Home to Turkey’s best cooks Population: 5,500
Market day: Saturday
Festival: Mengen Cooks and Tourism Festival, late September
Mengen, 58km northeast of Bolu along a winding wooded road, is known throughout Turkey for its great chefs who train at the Mengen Meslek Yüksekokulu (Vocational High School), a part of Abant İzzet Baysal University.
Every September it also hosts a cookery festival which is great fun although the food served at it is typical pilav günü (rice day) fare rather than the palace cuisine for which the town was once known. Indeed, when I attended the largest number of assembled chefs appeared to be dishing up packeted mashed potato! More exciting is the chance to see köçeks (male belly dancers) going through their paces.
Not surprisingly there’s a statue in front of the otogar showing chefs in tall hats wielding ladles.
“The world’s largest Mengen risotto”Despite all this excitement there are not actually that many interesting restaurants in Mengen itself since most of the people trained in the cookery school head straight for jobs in İstanbul hotels.
Transport info
There are regular buses from Ankara to Mengen as well as minibuses from Bolu. These leave from in front of the Women and Children’s Hospital, across the Anıt Parkı (Monument Park) from the Valilik or from the otogar.
Day trip destinations
Devrek
Yedigöller NP
Mengen houses once had lovely wooden verandahs like this. There’s a much better surviving example in nearby Gökcesu.
