Press & media

Press kit · Last updated May 2026

Welcome, journalists, food writers, and travel editors. This page collects everything you need to write about Taste Istanbul — fact sheet, founder bio, story angles, and downloadable assets. Need anything that isn't here? Email [email protected] and you'll usually get a reply the same day.

The 60-second pitch

Taste Istanbul is the curated walking food guide to one of the world's great culinary cities. 16 hand-built walking tours across 10 historic districts cover 230+ real, currently-operating restaurants, meyhanes, bakeries, and coffee bars — every entry editorially selected, never paid placement. The app is free, works offline, requires no sign-in, and contains no analytics or tracking SDKs whatsoever. Apple's App Store privacy label reads "Data Not Collected." It launched in May 2026.

Fact sheet

By the numbers

Five story angles

1. The privacy-first food guide

In a category dominated by data-vacuum apps that sell location and preference data to advertisers (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare, Google Maps), Taste Istanbul is the rare counter-example: no sign-in, no analytics SDK, no third-party trackers. The App Store's privacy label reads "Data Not Collected" — a designation fewer than 5% of free apps achieve. Built deliberately as a statement that food guides don't need to surveil their users.

2. Editorial, not algorithmic

Every venue in Taste Istanbul is selected by a single editorial voice — no user-generated reviews, no star ratings, no algorithmic ranking. The curation philosophy is closer to a Michelin guide or a print-era food magazine than to TripAdvisor. The result: 230 venues you can trust without doing a second pass through Google.

3. The Çiya Sofrası tour

Chef Musa Dağdeviren's Çiya Sofrası in Kadıköy was the subject of a celebrated Chef's Table episode on Netflix and is widely considered the most culturally significant restaurant in Turkey. Taste Istanbul builds a 5-stop walking tour around it that captures Kadıköy's Asian-side food culture in three hours.

4. Walking the Bosphorus, one meyhane at a time

The Beşiktaş Bosphorus Evening tour traces the European shore from a fish market through neighbourhood meyhanes up to the wooden mansions of Arnavutköy and finishes under the chandeliers of an Ottoman palace dining room. It's a walkable summary of why Istanbul is one of the world's great seafood cities.

5. The cross-district kebab trail

Most kebab "best of" lists collapse a centuries-old regional spectrum into a single category. Taste Istanbul's Kebab Trail walks readers through five very different traditions — Şanlıurfa-style at a 1920s institution in Sultanahmet, charcoal cağ kebabı in Sirkeci, Gaziantep cuisine in Etiler — in a single afternoon.

Founder bio

Taste Istanbul is built by Sadettin Köseoğlu, an independent iOS developer based in Istanbul. His previous app, MindfulScapes (immersive 4K natural retreats), is also on the App Store. Reach him at [email protected].

Quotes you can use

"Food guides shouldn't need to track you. Taste Istanbul is built on the bet that people would rather have one editor they trust than a thousand anonymous strangers and a recommendation algorithm trained against their interests."

— Sadettin Köseoğlu, founder

"Every venue in the app is somewhere I've eaten myself or have specific reasons to recommend. There are no paid placements in v1. If a restaurant is listed, it's listed because it earned it."

— Sadettin Köseoğlu, founder

Frequently asked questions

Why no user reviews?

Crowd-sourced ratings tend to converge on the loudest minority of reviewers and the lowest common denominator of taste. Taste Istanbul takes the opposite bet: one editorial voice, transparent reasoning, and the expectation that a reader who trusts the curator once can keep trusting them.

How are venues chosen?

Each venue is hand-selected for one of four reasons: deep regional cooking heritage, a generational connection to the city's food culture, technical excellence in a specific dish, or a uniquely Istanbul setting that elevates the meal. No paid placements in the launch version.

Is there a sponsorship model?

Future versions may add clearly-labeled sponsored placements — gold-badged at the top of category lists, transparent in the UI — but the editorial 230 will remain a permanent, unpaid backbone. Sponsorship will never reorder existing recommendations.

How is the app updated?

Content is delivered as JSON over a CDN. Tour descriptions, venue lists, and photography can be updated without an App Store release. The app reads a fresh copy on every launch and falls back to its bundled offline copy when there is no signal.

Brand assets

For the launch press kit, please use the app icon at /icon.png and direct readers to the App Store listing for screenshots. A higher-resolution media kit (logos, extended screenshots, district photography) is available on request from [email protected].

Editorial integrity

Taste Istanbul accepts no compensation, free meals, travel, or hosted experiences from venues featured in the app or on this website. All content is independently funded by the developer. If this changes in future versions, this page will be updated accordingly.