Musa Dağdeviren: The Chef Behind Istanbul's Çiya Sofrası

Who Is Musa Dağdeviren?

Musa Dağdeviren, born in 1960 in Nizip, a district of Gaziantep, is the founder of Çiya Sofrası in Istanbul's Kadıköy district. He is best known for documenting Anatolia's disappearing regional recipes through direct fieldwork rather than published sources, growing up within a family baking tradition on his mother's side.

From Bakery Apprentice to Restaurateur

He began working in his uncle's bakery at age five, moved to Istanbul in 1977 to learn both Istanbul- and Gaziantep-style kebab and pide at a wood-fired oven, and later trained under an Ankara-based cook known as "Domates Memed" (Tomato Memed) to learn soup-making. In 1987, he opened Çiya Kebap in Kadıköy with three friends, becoming sole owner the same year; Çiya Sofrası followed in 1998, drawing roughly 2,500 visitors on its opening night, and Çiya Kebap II in 2001.

The Dish That Started It All

Dağdeviren traces his research mission to a specific moment: returning to Nizip in the 1990s to look for a dumpling dish his mother used to make, he found no one still made it. That loss became the catalyst for a systematic effort to record recipes that exist only in oral memory before they disappear entirely.

Fieldwork Across Forty Villages

Dağdeviren expanded his kebab menu to over 100 items and introduced the first vegetarian lahmacun and kebab through research conducted in more than 40 villages across Turkey, working directly with elderly cooks and local producers. "If Çiya exists today it does not only because of Musa Dağdeviren," he has said. "It's because of Zeynep's incredible contributions" — a reference to his wife Zeynep Çalışkan, who joined the business in 1990 and became his partner in both the restaurant and its publishing ventures.

Publishing, the Çiya Foundation, and International Recognition

In 2005, Dağdeviren and Çalışkan co-founded Çiya Yayınları, producing the quarterly magazine "Yemek ve Kültür" (Food and Culture); he has authored eight books, five original and three translated. The Çiya Foundation later formalized this work into food and drink culture research and training for young cooks. In 2018, Çiya was featured in season five of Netflix's "Chef's Table," and in April 2019, Phaidon published his first English-language book, "The Turkish Cookbook," containing 550 recipes.