Tarsus’ quiet revolution

Ebru Erke

A day that begins in the fields at sunrise finds its way onto the plate just a few hours later. At Taarsa, the kitchen moves in rhythm with the producers themselves. After a career path stretching from Noma to Tarsus, Chef Melih Demirel is doing far more than serving food; he is reintroducing the forgotten gastronomic memory of Çukurova through its soil, its producers and its culture.

For years, Tarsus remained a quietly overlooked city. Yet it is far older than both Adana and Mersin, the two cities between which it sits and that historical depth has always echoed through its culinary culture. Five years ago, the Slow Food Earth Market initiative sparked a new wave of local awareness. Heirloom products whose names and flavors had nearly disappeared began resurfacing once again. In my opinion, the second major turning point in Tarsus’ gastronomic transformation came last year with the opening of Taarsa.

Chef Melih Demirel belongs to that increasingly rare group of chefs who prefer to speak through their work rather than through self-promotion. And yet, simply listing the kitchens he has worked in Noma, The French Laundry, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Narisawa and Estela is enough to understand the depth of his culinary background. He actually began this journey after leaving engineering behind. At the time, becoming a chef was nowhere near as fashionable as it is today. But his childhood memories had already been shaped entirely around food: Holiday tables, barbecue gatherings, döner-filled circumcision feasts and the image of his grandmother spending hours cleaning offal during Eid al-Adha.

His search for the right culinary education eventually led him to The Culinary Institute of America. Yet in many ways, his real education had begun much earlier, in the small fishing town where he grew up. Fishing, gathering thyme from the mountains, foraging for mushrooms, spearfishing, growing up surrounded by produce from the family farm… Only after entering culinary school did he realize what a privilege those seemingly ordinary experiences had actually been.

The agricultural discipline of Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the producer-chef relationship he witnessed at The French Laundry, Noma’s culture of foraging, and the precision of Narisawa all helped shape his culinary philosophy. But what ultimately stayed with him was not technique alone. It was respect for the ingredient itself.

A few years ago, he left behind his career in Istanbul and moved to Tarsus, the hometown of the woman he fell in love with. In many ways, it was not simply a move to another city, but a move into another memory.

Sometimes an outsider sees the value of a place more clearly than those who have lived there their entire lives. That was precisely what happened with Melih Chef. After years spent searching for honest, high-quality ingredients, he realized that in Tarsus those ingredients already existed naturally within everyday life. In Istanbul, reaching producers required building complicated systems. Here, farmers were simply part of life itself. Rather than merely studying the city, he chose to uncover its forgotten gastronomic memory.

Bitter orange, Sarı Ulak olives, tahini, the deep aroma of local lamb, the extraordinary diversity of Çukurova’s wild herbs, matsutake mushrooms pursued even by Japanese chefs, blue crab, Lek Lek beans, spotted trout… The longer the list became, the more Tarsus transformed from an ordinary city into what felt like an archaeological culinary treasure. Add to that one of Turkey’s finest knife makers and some of the country’s last remaining wood-carving ateliers and the city reveals itself not merely as a place of products, but as an ecosystem where craftsmanship and land remain inseparable. The chef summarizes it best in a single sentence: “For a chef, these ingredients are pure treasure.”

Taarsa was built precisely upon this philosophy. Yet Melih Chef feels that calling it simply a restaurant would be inadequate. To him, Taarsa is deeply personal, the physical reflection of a culinary philosophy shaped, refined and simplified over the course of 22 years.

Today, terms such as “farm to table,” “zero waste,” and “local sourcing” have become so overused that they often feel emptied of meaning. Yet Taarsa is one of the rare places where those ideas genuinely exist. “We don’t have suppliers,” he says. “We have producers. They are our partners. We are all part of the same table and the same ecosystem.”

One of the key pillars of this system has been the Slow Food Earth Market founded by Yasmina Lokmanoğlu. Through this network, they are able to know exactly who produces what and how. For Melih Chef, a sustainable kitchen can only exist through a relationship of trust with producers.

Taarsa’s entire production model is built around this approach. Olive oil comes from their own 80-year-old olive trees and is pressed at temperatures between 22 and 25 degrees Celsius. On their eight-acre pesticide-free farm in Kuyuluk, Mersin, wild herbs such as sirken, purslane, horseradish and wild watercress constantly find their way onto the menu. Their pickles, lacto-fermented sauces, pasta and much of their bread are all made in-house. Only two imported ingredients enter the kitchen: Rice vinegar and chocolate.

Perhaps what truly separates Taarsa from so many restaurants in Turkey today is that it does not use “locality” as nostalgic decoration. Here, locality is not a marketing language. It is simply everyday life. Many restaurants today try to tell the story of their geography without establishing any real relationship with the producers, the soil or the seasons themselves. At Taarsa, what arrives on the plate is not merely a well-cooked dish, but the climate, memory, agricultural culture and land of Çukurova itself. That may be why the food here never feels artificially constructed, but rather as though it exists exactly as it was always meant to.

They work with 99.5% local ingredients and admit that being able to source almost everything from within Çukurova makes them feel spoiled. After all, they are standing in the middle of one of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions. As a result, the menu changes every 30 to 40 days. One sentence from the chef stayed with me more than anything else: “In this kitchen, neither the chef nor the plate is the star. The ingredient is.”

At Taarsa, the day begins in the fields at seven in the morning. After harvesting the vegetables for the day, the team visits local fishermen. Asparagus cut that same morning, shrimp pulled from the nets only hours earlier, vegetables freshly picked from their own fields, everything reaches the plate on the very same day. That is why the menu avoids listing specific vegetables. Instead, diners encounter descriptions such as “field greens,” “wild herbs,” or “market greens.” Because whatever nature offers that morning is exactly what they want to see on the plate.

Olive oil forms the backbone of the kitchen. Around it revolve vegetables, wild herbs, citrus, grains and mushrooms that define Taarsa’s culinary identity. There is always an olive oil dish on the menu, often paired with seafood interpretations of traditional meze culture. They also work with an intensely aromatic local lamb breed known as Karakoyun, making sure to utilize not only prime cuts but also the head, sweetbreads and lesser-used parts of the animal across different menus.

For Melih Chef, Tarsus is not a random location. It is a place with memory. The more he traveled the world, the more he realized that the strongest culinary cultures are the ones that remain connected to their roots. Taarsa emerged from precisely that idea: Retelling the memory of Çukurova through a modern culinary language.