Gaziantep’s chefs argue for yuvalama

Gaziantep’s most famous dishes are useful shorthand and bad reporting habits. Kebab and baklava travel well, which is part of the problem. At the GastroAntep Culture Route Festival, a group of 12 chefs used a more demanding method: they went through 73 stops in the city and came back insisting that a visitor should eat wider, and in particular eat yuvalama.

According to Onedio Yemek’s account of the festival programme, the chefs gathered under the Tourism Promotion and Development Agency’s “Lezzet Noktası” project, hosted by Mehmet Yalçınkaya and Doğa Çitçi. The guest list included Ahmet Güzelyağdöken, Umut Karakuş, Ömür Akkor, Erşan Yılmaz, Bib Gourmand recipient Tamer Özkan, Selen Mağzalcıoğlu, Şafak Erten, Harun Raşit Dönmez, Celal Gürkan Yılmaz and Gökhan Ali Çamkerten, joined on the route by writer Hilal Kayış Sungur and gastronomy researcher Kübra Yüzüncüyıl.

What matters is not the celebrity assembly but the pattern in their recommendations. Yuvalama appears again and again alongside analı kızlı, kuru dolma, şiveydiz, akıtmalı ufak köfte and yoğurtlu patates. That repetition works as a correction. A city often flattened into meat and syrup is being described, by cooks with public authority, through a broader table.

Source 1 says one chef’s advice was to divide the day by meals: yuvalama, analı kızlı and kuru dolma at lunch; alinazik and different kebab varieties at dinner; baklava and katmer for dessert. Çitçi’s own list includes yuvalama together with akıtmalı ufak köfte, yoğurtlu patates and damat dolması. For first-time visitors, the same source says, her three recommendations are Antep baklavası, yuvalama and Gaziantep lahmacunu. Coşkun Koçak’s picks are also baklava, beyran and yuvalama. Another stop’s recommendations include beyran, yuvalama and şiveydiz.

That does not make yuvalama the single emblem of Gaziantep, but it does show how insistently the chefs returned to it. Public food culture has a way of rewarding whatever looks best on a skewer or in a shop window. These recommendations lean the other way, toward dishes that locals may treat as obvious and visitors often miss.

The same account leaves room for beyran, menengiç coffee and nohut dürüm. One coffeehouse is described as roughly 400 years old and identified with menengiç coffee served with milk. One beyran stop is noted for lamb boiled for around 12 to 13 hours. Those details matter because they resist the reduced version of Gaziantep sold from afar.

For once, the useful part of a food festival was not the celebrity roll call but the narrowing of a question: if you go to Gaziantep and eat only kebab and baklava, the city has told you more than you heard.