Tantuni

Beef cut into tiny strips, boiled soft and then fried fast on a huge domed sac with cottonseed oil and salt, rolled into a thin lavash with tomato, onion, parsley and sumac, and eaten standing with a glass of şalgam: tantuni is the street food of Mersin, on Türkiye's Mediterranean coast, and the city will tell you that nowhere else gets it right. The name is said to echo the tan-tun sound of the cook's metal spatula hitting the sac as the meat is chopped and turned, though that is the kind of story that is repeated more than it is proved. It spread from Mersin to Adana and then to Istanbul from the 1980s, and today a tantuni shop is recognisable from the street by the wide, slightly concave griddle and the queue of people eating out of paper.