Beton Helva (Çamlık Branch)

The name comes first, because it explains the shop. In the 1950s Mustafa Özbak's workshop sat beneath an architecture office called Beton on Trabzon's Uzun Sokak, and customers directing each other there said simply "under Beton". That, together with the way the halva looked spread across the marble slab, turned into a product name — beton helva, concrete halva — which the family later registered as a trademark.

Özbak was born in Akçaabat in 1932 and started at twelve as an apprentice in a small confectioner's in Trabzon's Moloz quarter. By the early 1950s he had worked his way up to master, left, and opened his own workshop; production began in 1953 in the Saruhan arcade on Uzun Sokak, with his elder brother Kazım handling the selling.

This record covers the Çamlık branch, on Soğuksu Mahallesi's Vatan Caddesi — the address the company moved its production to in 2009 and still manufactures from. The shop carries winter tahini halvas, plain, with pistachio and with hazelnut, in sizes from bulk blocks down to 400-gram tubs, alongside koz halva. Summer brings semolina halva and a fruit version. Tahini and three molasses — grape, carob and mulberry — sit on the same shelf, and the shop also makes ice cream, which it describes as being made with cow's milk gathered from the highland pastures above Trabzon and with sahlep, plus şıra, a non-alcoholic grape must drink sold beside it through the summer.