Wanna be Wanna
The other night, I joined friends at a birthday party at Wanna in Beyoglu, a new Asian fusion restaurant (low lights, dark rough wood, heavy black patent leather chairs, neon art) that turns into a bar/nightclub at midnight. The food was OK, not fabulous, prices actually weren’t bad — $15-20 an entree. Endless very slim young women with long hair dressed in fashionable but sexy clothing. Rough looking men and slick ones, all dressed in that understated magazine ad way. I don’t think there was anyone over thirty-five (except me). This was definitely the place to be. I left shortly after its transformation to nightclub (techno music, chairs disappear, alcohol and juice appear on all the tables as self-mix bars — there was a regular fancy bar at the other end). I was riveted by all the interesting people and looking forward to some dancing, but couldn’t keep my eyes open (jetlag) and the cigarette smoke was getting to me. Turkey has banned smoking everywhere soon, and this is the adjustment period. I saw no one ‘adjusting’. I can’t imagine Turks not smoking. But it’s happened elsewhere, so why not here. I pushed my way out through a solid mass of beautiful people. Outside a line of hopefuls were pressed against the velvet rope waiting to be admitted.
Where is Wanna? Right down the street from the staid Hotel de Luxembourg where Kamil sipped a whiskey with Bernie — and smoked cigarettes! The entire street has begun a new gentrification. In Kamil’s time it was full of genteel hotels and ballrooms and restaurants. A few years later than the period in the Kamil Pasha novels the famous Pera Pala Hotel was built just down the road to host travelers on the Orient Express. (Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in her room at the Pera Palas.) In the twentieth century, when the Ottoman Empire was replaced by the Turkish nation state, the district declined as many of its non-Muslim residents were driven out or left, fearing harrassment by Turkish nationalists. Istanbul now is a kaleidoscope of people and lifestyles, but nothing like the ethnic and religious mix of Kamil’s time. Most residents are Muslims, whether secular or devout in lifestyle. It is in the architecture that Ottoman pluralism is remembered. There are churches and synagogues everywhere. If you look closely, you can find inscriptions in Greek over the thresholds of buildings in Beyoglu or a Star of David. And in the past two decades of economic growth and globalization, the street (Mesrutiyet Caddesi) has become chic again. There’s Wanna. There’s the wonderful Pera Museum. And right on the corner is a modern glass tube of a building that is the Istanbul Culinary Institute where people can learn to cook Ottoman/Turkish/Mediterranean cuisine on the upper floors and the rest of us can eat what they cook in the ground floor restaurant. In Kamil’s day most middle-class households had a family cook like Kamil’s Karanfil. Now we have to sign up to learn these lovely recipes ourselves.