By Jill Nagy
Istanblue Mediterranean Cuisine, in Congress
Plaza at 68 Congress Street in Saratoga Springs,
offers Mediterranean food with a Turkish accent.
Both the owner, Resul Yalsin, and the chef,
his uncle Rauf Ziya, hail from Turkey.
Ziya said he learned to cook “from my mom”
among other people, but he has been cooking
professionally for some 25 years.
He started a Turkish restaurant in Brooklyn,
Adana Kebab on Coney Island Avenue. Other
venues for his talents were a second restaurant
in Brooklyn, and Bosporus I and II in Newport
Beach, Calif. At one point he retired to Florida,
but worked part time as a chef at a restaurant
there.
Now, he heads the kitchen at Istanblue, helped by several family members and a former colleague from Florida.
After some five months in Saratoga, Ziya said he likes the city but he has been too busy to explore it very much. Business is picking up, he noted, and he is thinking of adding brunch service to the current lunch and dinner schedules.
Yalsin owned businesses in his native Duzce, a city near Ankara, including a restaurant he ran for five years. He has been in Saratoga for almost three years and, before opening Istanblue, he owned Pizza 7 on Caroline Street.
Some of the food items are imported from Turkey and many of the rest come from specialty wholesalers in New Jersey.
The full menu is on the restaurant’s website, www.istanbluemediterranean.com. It includes some relatively familiar items like hummus, falafel, and babaghanoush, and some more exotic dishes like grilled octopus and fried calamari.
For the less adventuresome, there are a variety of soups, salads, appetizers, steaks and fish dishes.
The restaurant is open seven days a week, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Food is also available for carry-out or delivery. The telephone number is 581-0181.