More Proof Turkey Was Never Part of the Soviet Union, Part 1,349

There's a great website in Istanbul called Yemeksepeti. Through it, you can order food to be delivered from hundreds of restaurants all around the city, without ever speaking to a person. There's even an English version which ensures there's no chance you're going to end up with artichokes on your salad, rather than oysters 'cause you always mix up those words. I heart Yemeksepeti!

Last night I ordered a pizza from Miss Pizza, which is, oh, about a 10 minute walk from my front door (but it's uphill!). It arrived within 30 minutes as it always does. When I opened it, it was clear the box had been dropped. The goat cheese and spinach and eggplants and tomatoes were all askew.  What a mess! I ate it anyway.

Less out of a desire to initiate a consumer dispute than just to see what would happen, I emailed Yemeksepeti explaining the situation.

Within five minutes, my phone rang. Yemeksepeti was calling to tell me Miss Pizza was sending a new pizza over right away! Now I have two pizzas! Yum!

Let me try to explain why this scenario, like so many others, would never have played out like this in the FSU, and not just because I got some consumer satisfaction. Not only would the very concept of Yemeksepeti not exist, in a language I could read, with restaurants I'd want to order from serving food I'd want to eat at reasonable prices; not only would I order a goat cheese and spinach pizza and get a dry pork chop covered in cheese, I would be told "but that's what you ordered" and the delivery guy would have dropped it in the slush and his response would be that I dropped it just so I could get another one for free, but I would never dream of asking for recompense in the first place.

How much do I love Istanbul?

Comments

[Kate]

Funny.

This weekend I was at a popular outdoors restaurant in Baku. The salad took 45 minutes to arrive. It was the wrong one, but at that point I was so hungry it didn't matter.

When I was done five minutes later, I asked for the check which didn't arrive for another half hour. I needed change and didn't have another half hour to spare, so I took the check directly to the cashier. When I was leaving a mob of angry waiters accused me of trying to leave without paying.

The cashier explained that I had already paid and handed one of them the tip in the blue plastic check holder thingy.

An angry waiter yelled to my back as I was leaving, "Next time you don't try to be thief."

I went back, took the plastic check holder thingy back, counted back my four manat tip slowly in Russian, pocketed it and walked out. The waiters started laughing. I can only imagine what they will go home and tell their families about those wacky foreigners.

[Melissa Maples]

Yemeksepeti.com isn't just for Istanbul, it's for all of Turkey. We use it down here in Antalya; when you first tell it where you live, it remembers that city for future visits and assumes that those are the restaurants you want to see.

We order from yemeksepeti all the time and you're right, it's amazing.

[vagabondblogger]

We have something similar called otlob.com "the biggest restaurants network in Egypt" and you can order or look at menus by neighborhood, which is nice, because even the McDonald's here does not have an English menu. I only recognize the quater pounder (called something else) and the McArabia, when I look at the print menu (yes, McDonalds in Cairo delivers - apparently everyone here does - I can even get alcohol delivered).

[carpetblogger]

McD's delivers here too, through both Yemeksepeti and its own "Allo Servis." While you can get almost anything delivered, I have never seen anyone deliver alcohol. I suppose if your local bakkal has beer (most don't), they'd deliver it along with anything else.

[strudel]

The story of how pizza became more than a peasant's food goes as follows, in 1889 Queen Margherita accompanied her husband, Umberto I of Savoia, on an inspection of his Italian Kingdom. During her trips around the kingdom she saw many peasants and poor people eating a flat bread which they called "Pizza". While in Naples, the curious queen summoned her guards and asked them to bring her a piece of this flat bread. The queen liked what she ate and would eat this flat bread every time she went out of her palace.

The queen was extremely popular with the masses and had developed a great liking for their Pizza. This taste was considered somewhat undesirable in court circles. One day in June, on the Queen's insistence Raffaele Esposito was summoned from his pizzeria to the palace to bake a selection of Pizzas for the Queen.

Raffaele in order to honour the Queen's desire for his pizzas baked a special pizza with tomato, mozzarella cheese and basil (the colours of the Italian flag - red/white/green).

[Bulent Murtezaoglu]

Re: booze delivery. It illegal for a short while for alcoholic beverages and cigarettes to be ordered via the web. That law has been rescinded or struck down by the courts and now you can order those items thru online Gima, online Migros and such. (I don't think piety had anything to do with the ban, it seemed more like the machinations of the bakkal lobby against the online supermarkets.)

[Ahmet Özdemir]

Now, it is legal for alcoholic beverages and cigarettes to be ordered via the web. You can order these items through a site called İckiburada. The link is www.ickiburada.com, I think it is a great entreprenaurship idea!