The seaside restaurant where I first learned this skill still exists in Tarabya Bay, parked among the well-healed Bosphorus establishments on the way to the Black Sea. Although it has been years since I went there I still remember being instructed how to delicately removed the dorsal bones of a perfectly grilled bluefish, and then, with a surgeon’s grace, inscribe a line down the length of the vertebral column, slide two perfect fillets off the bone, and then with a surgeon’s skill, gently lift out the skeleton.Knowing how to behave before a naked fish is an accomplishment that has stood me in good stead. I have friends who wield a fish knife as if it were a clubbed foot, who could no more extract the fish cheeks from a snapper than they could pierce their own nose, and when presented with a crisply fried red mullet the size of an index finger are unable to get at the unique taste of its sweet and tender flesh for fear of choking on a pectoral fin. I dare say most restaurants that are even a little bit upmarket will offer to fillet the fish for you, but to accept that sort of help is as macho as asking the waiter to cut your steak. The fish in Istanbul are meant to leap out of the sea and onto your plate. You have to be prepared to show them who’s boss.
Learning to negotiate fish bones is not the same as learning to appreciate a meal, and it was years later that I obtained that truly esoteric knowledge only to be had on a cool summer’s night, watching the black waters of Istanbul beneath a moonless, starry sky. Dinner, preferably with a Bosphorus lookout, is a ritual full of meaning and in its way as pure as Japanese tea ceremony. It is all about generating a sense of well-being, a metaphysical tradition known as keyf -- or “pleasure.” Food, setting and conversation. The friendships bonded as the mound of fish bones grew higher have been the ones that have stayed with me for life.
Alas, the variety of fish is not as plentiful as when I was young. If that makes me sound like the ancient mariner, it really wasn’t all that long ago that the Black Sea and Marmara were less polluted and the population of Istanbul less than a tenth of what it is now. Fish is now a luxury, though two great Bosphorus fish still frisk in autumn -- that bluefish (lüfer) on which I first practiced (always grilled) and palamut, a firmer fish often cut into cross sections and fried. It is a tastier version of bonito, and Istanbulites are partial to the first run -- the gypsy palamut -- smaller and full of flavor, and they feel sorry for those who live downstream of the Bosphorus in places like Greece when the fish has burned up all its tasty fat and becomes less succulent. There are other fish that grace Istanbul’s tables -- you can re-mortgage your house to indulge in turbot or wild sea bass. (The farmed variety lacks that firm springy texture and subtle taste.) By contrast some of the really most flavorful are regarded as too humble to grace expensive restaurants: fresh anchovies full of musk, sardines grilled in vine leaves or, and best of all, fried horse mackerel (istavrit) that you can eat with your fingers like a chicken wing.
Of course even these modest fish might soon be as rare as an uncluttered Bosphorus view. I read that sturgeon caviar in the city of Byzantium was regarded as food for the poor rather than the endangered luxury it is today. Perhaps in the future, diners will have to cement those friendships over pizza and kebabs while some ancient mariner in the corner laments over the days long gone when people knew how to bone a fish.
