Discover the Soul
of Turkish Cuisine

Meet Ferhat Şimşek

Ferhat Şimşek grew up watching his grandmother turn humble pantry staples into extraordinary meals — dishes that carried the memory of entire villages. Based in Gaziosmanpaşa, İstanbul, he has spent years travelling to remote corners of Anatolia, the Aegean coast, and the Black Sea highlands to document recipes that risk disappearing with the generation that still knows them by heart. Each recipe on this site is the result of patient listening, careful tasting, and handwritten notes gathered around someone else's kitchen table.

ferhatsimsek is not a cookbook brand or a commercial venture — it is an act of preservation. Ferhat believes that a recipe is also a map: of a landscape, a season, a way of life. His goal is simply to make sure these maps are not lost. Whether it is a sour tarhana from Sivas or a slow-braised kuzu from the Taurus Mountains, every dish here belongs to the people who first made it — and now, to anyone willing to cook it with the same love.