Chef-Owner, Çiya Kebap and Çiya Sofrasi; Istanbul, Turkey

Musa Dağdeviren is chef-owner of Istanbul’s Çiya Sofrasi, where he is widely considered to be one of the foremost experts on the diverse regional cuisines of Turkey. Chef Dağdeviren has spent a lifetime learning about these food traditions, beginning in his uncle's bakery at age five. Later as a teenager, he cooked alongside his uncle, where he was responsible for the wood burning oven and learned to make kebabs and appetizers in the Istanbul and Gaziantep styles, as well as to develop his skills with pide. In 1987 he opened Çiya Kebap, and in 1990, Zeynep Caliskan, who would later become his wife, joined the restaurant family. Musa’s experience and research interests allowed him to grow the kebab menu to over one-hundred items, including creating the first vegetarian lahmacun and kebab. In 1998 he opened Çiya Sofrasi, where he created a unique menu featuring regional recipes and techniques found because of Musa’s anthropological fieldwork to villages across the country. In 2001 he started another kebab restaurant, Ciya Kebap II. In 2005, Musa and Zeynep established Çiya Publishing Company and started to publish a semi-academic quarterly magazine called Food and Culture, as well as eight books – three of which they have translated. Musa’s work to keep regional Turkish dishes from going extinct was acknowledged on season five of the Netflix Emmy Award-winning docuseries, Chef’s Table (2018). In 2019, Phaidon published The Turkish Cookbook, which contains five-hundred-and-fifty recipes and is his first work in English. Musa and Zeynep established the Çiya Foundation ten years ago; it produces research and projects in relation to food and drinks culture. @ciyasofrasi