What Is a Turkish Breakfast? A Guide to Kahvaltı

The word for breakfast in Turkish, kahvaltı, comes from two words: kahve (coffee) and altı (before) — literally, "before coffee." It's a small clue to how central the meal is: everything else comes first, and coffee (or more often, tea) comes after.

Turkish breakfast traces back to simple rural mornings of bread, cheese, olives, and dairy, which grew more elaborate through the late Ottoman period as jams, cured meats, and pastries joined the table. By the 20th century, cafés and tea gardens across Turkey had turned it into the format most people recognize today: a spread of small dishes meant to be shared, not rushed through.

A proper kahvaltı table usually includes a few different cheeses (soft white beyaz peynir, semi-hard kaşar), olives, sliced cucumber and tomato, honey and kaymak (clotted cream), jam, tahini and pekmez (grape molasses), and eggs — often sucuklu yumurta, eggs cooked with sliced Turkish sausage. Bread and pastries round it out, alongside glass after glass of tea.

It's less a meal than an occasion — the kind of breakfast that can stretch a full hour on a weekend. Our Turkish Breakfast Plate is our own take on that table, built the same way: a little bit of everything, meant to be lingered over.