Ankara vs Istanbul: Turkey's Underrated Food City

Mention a food tour in Turkey and almost everyone pictures Istanbul. It's understandable — Istanbul is dazzling, and its food deserves every bit of its fame. But I live and eat in Ankara, and I'll make the case here that the capital is one of Turkey's most underrated food cities. This isn't about running Istanbul down; it's a wonderful place to eat. It's about explaining why Ankara, the city that doesn't top the tourist lists, might just give you the more authentic — and more comfortable — taste of how Turkey actually eats.

Istanbul has the spotlight — and deserves a lot of it

Let me be fair from the start: Istanbul earns its reputation. It's a vast, layered, endlessly delicious city, a meeting point of cuisines, and if you've only got one Turkish food destination on your list, no one would blame you for choosing it. The food-tour scene there is enormous for good reason, and the city has more genuinely great places to eat than anyone could get through in a lifetime. So this isn't a takedown. It's simply the observation that when one city absorbs all the attention, another can get overlooked — and Ankara, Turkey's capital, is the one that gets overlooked. Being overlooked, as it turns out, has its own quiet rewards.

What Ankara brings to the table

Here's what surprises people: as the capital, Ankara is dynamic and multicultural, and it represents a huge range of cuisines — yet it's the city's strong local delicacies that make it such rewarding ground for a food tour. This is a city with its own signature dishes, not borrowed ones. Ankara tava, the peppery lamb and rice bake tied to weddings and celebrations. Beypazarı stew, slow-cooked in an earthen pot in Ankara's own Beypazarı district. The markets of Ulus, the long breakfasts, the cured meats, the everyday food cooked the way it's been cooked for generations. Ankara isn't trying to be Istanbul. It has its own table, and it's a good one. I've laid out the full spread in our guide to what to eat in Ankara.

Fewer crowds, fewer queues, more room to breathe

The practical difference you feel almost immediately is space. Ankara isn't the top tourist draw, and that's precisely its advantage at the table. You're not queuing for an hour for a famous spot, not eating elbow-to-elbow with a hundred other visitors, not watching a place that locals abandoned to tourism years ago. Eating, drinking and living like a local here is a world away from long queues and ordinary, dressed-up meals. There's a calm to it. You can linger over a market stall, change your plans on a whim, and let a meal run as long as it likes without ever feeling like you're holding up a queue. You can take your time, sit where residents sit, and eat food that's cooked for the neighbourhood rather than for a guidebook.

The authenticity of a capital that isn’t playing to tourists

There's a particular kind of honesty to eating in a city that hasn't been reshaped around visitors. When a place isn't performing for tourism, the food stays true to itself — markets trade for the people who live nearby, grills cook for regulars, breakfast tables fill with families on a weekend morning. Prices are what locals pay, portions are what locals expect, and the welcome is the genuine kind rather than the practised one. That's the Ankara food experience: not a curated highlight reel, but the genuine daily rhythm of how a capital eats. For a lot of travellers, that authenticity turns out to be exactly what they were hoping to find in Turkey in the first place, and didn't expect to find in the capital.

So which should you choose?

If you can, the honest answer is both — they're different experiences, not competing ones. Istanbul gives you scale, spectacle and a food scene that goes on forever. Ankara gives you depth, calm and the sense of having eaten somewhere real, among locals, without the crowds. But if you've already done Istanbul, or you want the version of Turkey that the tour buses skip, the capital is the smarter, fresher choice. It's the underrated option, and underrated is usually where the best eating hides.

Taste the capital with a local

The best way to discover an underrated food city is with someone who actually lives there, which is the whole idea behind what we do. Our small-group, all-inclusive tours are built around exactly this: As Locals Do takes you eating and drinking the way Ankara residents really do, while Capital and Global pairs the city's local gems with its international side. If you'd like to understand why we think Ankara is such fertile ground for a food tour, our Ankara city guide makes the case in full. Give the capital a chance — come hungry, follow the locals, and let Ankara surprise you.