Mikla

Mikla is a rooftop restaurant crowning The Marmara Pera hotel in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, with views across the city. Its cooking is called the New Anatolian Kitchen.

Chef-owner Mehmet Gürs was born in Finland to a Turkish father and a Finnish-Swedish mother and grew up in Stockholm. He trained in the United States, studying hotel and restaurant management at Johnson & Wales University, and settled in Istanbul in the mid-1990s, where he opened Downtown and then Lokanta. Time Out Istanbul gave Downtown its best restaurant award and later named Gürs the best chef of the city. Mikla followed in October 2005, conceived as a refined but contemporary restaurant of the city. Its name comes from Miklagard, the great city, the Old Norse name for Istanbul. Time Out Istanbul named it the best restaurant of the city a year after the opening.

The New Anatolian Kitchen, launched some years later, builds the menu on noble produce from Anatolia and changes it daily. Hamsi, the Black Sea anchovies, come fried and paired with a white wine from Cappadocia, and a smoked lamb loin is served with charred endive and apple molasses next to a red wine from a native grape. Diners choose between a three-course menu and a longer tasting menu, and a rooftop bar above the dining room serves drinks after dinner.

Gürs's company, which also runs the café chain numnum and the coffee roaster Kronotrop, keeps a research kitchen of its own. In October 2022, when the Michelin Guide published its first selection for Istanbul, Mikla was among the restaurants awarded a star.