The Best Turkish Food in the United States

A wine bar on Clement Street doing Turkish food with a California edit, and the Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand to prove the combination works. The börek arrives golden and shatteringly flaky, the hummus floats in chili oil, and the künefe kadayif pulls cheese under a crunch of pistachio. The wine list runs deep and leans affordable, which explains why nobody at the small tables seems to be in any hurry to leave.

Tucked into a cobblestone Georgetown alley, this Turkish and Mediterranean dining room draws from homestyle cooking, particularly the "From Mom's Kitchen" section of the menu. The sesame-and-nigella-seeded bread goes with everything, and the rice-stuffed artichoke, a recreation of an Aegean dish the chef grew up eating, earned a Washingtonian dish of the year. The chef was a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic.

A solo chef running every aspect of a dozen-seat Turkish restaurant in DTLA is either a romantic gesture or a logistical nightmare, and here it reads as both. Order at the kiosk, find a stool at a white wood table under a ceiling of warm wood and hanging greenery, and settle in for Anatolian cooking that has fine-dining technique somewhere in its past but no interest in showing off about it. The Michelin Guide has it selected.

A glass-walled kitchen kiosk tiled in blue and white anchors this casual Turkish café tucked inside a shopping enclave, with most of the action happening at outdoor tables under old oak trees. The menu runs breakfast and mezze all day, with house-baked börek, manti, and egg dishes that lean on Turkish pantry flavors rather than brunch clichés. The Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks for a spot this unfussy and this good at what it does.

A strip-mall Turkish restaurant in Englewood with four tables and portions that could feed a small village. The menu runs through lamb shish kebabs, börek, pita-wrapped gyros, and the layered iskender, all at prices that make you feel briefly guilty. The team runs the room with the kind of warmth that makes strangers feel like regulars. Finish with baklava and strong Turkish coffee, then figure out how to button your coat.

A honeycomb-patterned wall and a floor-to-ceiling Hagia Sophia mural set the scene at this Turkish restaurant in Mt. Vernon Triangle, where the room does a lot of the talking before the food arrives. The menu runs through hot and cold meze, kebabs, and the kind of baklava that makes you order Turkish coffee just to have an excuse to keep sitting there. Dressy enough for a date, relaxed enough for a long Tuesday dinner.

Cooks wield handheld fans to coax heat from a fire-only range, which tells you what kind of restaurant Hamdi is before a dish arrives. The chef came up through a three-Michelin-star kitchen in California, and the Turkish menu, pide, kebap, kofte, and a 42-day dry-aged porterhouse, carries that technique without tipping into fussiness. Prices are ambitious, and the kitchen knows it. Ballard's most serious dinner out.

A weekend Turkish breakfast served in a Mission lifestyle café is a good thing to keep quiet about. Healthyish Republic pitches itself at the keto-and-paleo crowd, but on Fridays through Sundays it sets out a spread of cheeses, vegetables, and dips across a dozen small dishes, portioned for two. The kaymak, clotted cream pooled in honey and dusted with pistachio, sits somewhere between yogurt and cream cheese and goes on warm pita.

The chef caps Bosforo kebap at fifty daily, so ordering early isn't optional so much as strategic. This modern Turkish restaurant in Normal Heights serves wood-fired hummus, hand-minced beef skewers, and lahmacun alongside homestyle dishes the chef grew up on but couldn't find a reason to put on a menu until now. The room draws a neighborhood crowd that clearly got there before you.