lunch & dinner, bar, cafe
Our Story
A Mediterranean kitchen, opened in Istanbul in December 2023.
Clove opened in December 2023 on the upper floor of İstinye Park, in partnership between Chef Emre Şen, Yaprak Baltacı, and Başak Soykan. The conviction behind it is simple: the Mediterranean — read broadly, from the Aegean to the Levant, from North Africa to the Italian coast — is the most generous culinary tradition in the world. And Istanbul is the city where its threads meet.
The kitchen is led by Chef Emre Şen, whose restaurant at Casa Lavanda holds a Michelin Star and a Michelin Green Star. His technique was grounded in his training under Chef Maurilio Garola at the Michelin-starred La Ciau del Tornavento in Alba, and refined in the years he has spent leading Casa Lavanda. The cooking at Clove is his city counterpart: a Mediterranean kitchen built around a small set of specialties — the long-fermented pizzettas, the daily-made pasta, the line-caught fish from the Northern Aegean and Black Sea, the in-house dry-aged steak, the truffle and forest mushrooms in season, the raw bar with Gillardeau oysters and Ostreccia caviar. The dishes rarely announce how much work has gone into them. That is intentional.
The menu changes with the season. Şen builds it around the best of Turkish produce — a farm in Şile, a fisherman in Çanakkale — and writes new dishes as the produce turns. The wine list leans toward Turkish producers, alongside a careful international selection. The bar is led by a small team that takes its craft seriously without making a show of it.
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The room itself was designed by Mahmut Anlar and shaped under the creative direction of Murat Türkili — paintings, sculpture, and an evolving collection of contemporary art built into the architecture rather than hung against it, anchored by the wall rising above the stairs between the café and the dining room. The dining room seats 150, with around forty of those seats on the terrace. From May through October the terrace opens onto the Istanbul skyline and becomes one of the most requested tables in the city. From November the room turns inward — warmer, slower, the long winter dinners the city is good at.
Clove operates all day. The café opens earlier, at a quieter pace — coffee, pastries, lunch for the afternoons that don't need a full meal. The restaurant runs from lunch at 12:30 through dinner. On Friday and Saturday, the room shifts register at 22:00, when resident DJ Engin Yelkenci — one of the figures who shaped what Istanbul sounds like after dark — takes the music into the late hours. Different rhythms, same room.
Clove is the third restaurant of a small family of three. Morini, a New York–Italian kitchen at Zorlu Center, has been one of Istanbul's social anchors for over a decade. Clove is here. And Época, the chef's casual counterpart, is downstairs in the new corridor at İstinye Park. Three rooms, three registers, the same people behind them.
We are upstairs from the rush of the mall, and we like it that way — close enough to find, removed enough to slow down once you do. Come for a long lunch on the terrace, an afternoon coffee between meetings, a quiet Tuesday dinner, or a Friday that runs into Saturday. The door is open.
We hope to see you upstairs.