Chef Çiğdem Seferoğlu brings traditional recipes into the present at Hodan while taking care to preserve their original character with minimal intervention.
Hodan has moved from Beyoğlu to Nişantaşı. But the real change is not in its address; it is in the kitchen. Today, Çiğdem Seferoğlu is pursuing a cuisine that intervenes less and listens more. So is bringing a cuisine into the present about how much we can change a dish — or about knowing when to stop?
There is a story behind the bread currently arriving at the table at Hodan that is far more interesting than a chef-created recipe. On one of her visits to a garden outside Istanbul where she goes to buy vegetables, Çiğdem Seferoğlu was offered some bread the local women had made for themselves. The dough had been baked between vine leaves. Here, the leaves are not decorative: They form a layer between the dough and the heat, imparting a gently tart, vegetal aroma to the bread. Seferoğlu tasted it, was struck by it and brought the bread back to Hodan.
But this is where the important part of the story begins. Once she brought it into the restaurant, she resisted the temptation to turn it into a “chef’s creation.” What she had encountered, she felt, was less a recipe than a way of doing things, and she wanted to carry that knowledge to her own table with as little distortion as possible. Because sometimes, in her view, the best intervention a cook can make is not to intervene too much. She describes Hodan as “a cuisine of Istanbul and Anatolia with a memory, expressed in the language of today.”
After four and a half years in its historic Beyoğlu building, Hodan moved to Nişantaşı around two months ago. Yet the change at the new Hodan strikes me as more philosophical than physical. The early urge to say everything at once has given way to a desire to say less, but say it more clearly. To me, that is one of the clearest signs of a restaurant coming of age.
Part of that refinement lies in listening more carefully to the sources from which the kitchen draws its knowledge. In traditional cuisines, it is often impossible to identify the true author of a dish. Hodan’s içli köfte is a perfect example. The filling carries the knowledge of the Gaziantep family of Hasan, who has worked alongside Çiğdem for more than 15 years; the outer shell bears traces of Çiğdem’s own family and the Central Anatolian tradition of boiled içli köfte. Two families and two geographical memories meet in a single dish.
This is why one of Çiğdem’s favourite questions in the kitchen is: “How did you make this at home?” One cook’s mother fries the onions differently; another’s grandmother uses a different spice; in someone else’s hometown, the same ingredient is prepared using an entirely different technique. That knowledge enters the kitchen, where it is discussed, tested and eventually translated into the language of the restaurant. Seen this way, the chef ceases to be the person who creates everything and becomes part curator, part researcher and part custodian of inherited knowledge.
At a special dinner Hodan recently hosted with Miele, a brand the restaurant has worked with for years, Çiğdem spoke about the dishes that have become Hodan’s “masterpieces” over time. But what constitutes a restaurant masterpiece? Is it the dish made with the most expensive ingredients, the most technically accomplished plate, or the one that, years later, you still cannot bring yourself to remove from the menu because it has become inseparable from the identity of the restaurant? At Hodan, the answer is closer to the third.
The artichoke is one of them. It is first cooked in the simplest, most traditional way, then breaded and fried. The memory of the ingredient remains intact while another layer of technique is added. Tarama opens another door into the cuisine of Istanbul: Served on cornbread with truffle purée, it brings together flavours that might initially seem distant without erasing the character of the tarama itself. Vegetables, meanwhile, have always been Hodan’s quieter masterpieces. Artichokes, chard, borage and fennel are not garnishes placed beside meat; they are ingredients considered important enough to command the centre of the plate in their own right.
It is here that Hodan’s understanding of what it means to be contemporary becomes clearest. “Bringing something into the present does not mean correcting what came before,” Çiğdem says. It is an important distinction. Traditional cuisines are sometimes approached with a curious sense of superiority, as though a dish made for centuries is finally going to be “improved” once it passes through the hands of a contemporary chef. Yet many of these recipes are the result of geography, climate, scarcity and abundance, the need to preserve food and generations of trial and error.
So where is the line? How far can you change an içli köfte, an artichoke or a tarama before it ceases to be itself? For Çiğdem, the answer lies in taste memory. The recipe can change, as can the technique, the presentation and even some of the ingredients. But if someone who grew up eating that dish tastes it and feels no sense of recognition, then you have made something else. Sometimes the entire memory of a dish is held in the smell of onions browning in a pan; sometimes in the acidity of yoghurt or the lingering flavour of butter. Once the memory disappears, all that remains is technique.
The direction Hodan is now taking is really an extension of the same idea. Its kitchen garden in Beykoz has transformed the restaurant’s relationship with produce: Fennel root and fronds, chard, cabbage, borage… The future promises more plants, more producers and greater sensitivity to the seasons — but, conversely, a little less intervention. Because innovation does not always mean adding something. Sometimes it means understanding the history of a dish well enough to remove what it does not need; sometimes it means genuinely listening to someone else’s knowledge; and sometimes it means having the restraint to encounter a loaf of bread baked between vine leaves and leave it largely as it is.
Perhaps this is where a chef truly comes of age: Not when they learn to make their signature more visible on every plate, but when they become confident enough to step back and let it disappear from some of them.
