Orhan Yegen makes waves at Sea Salt
(Credit: Noah Kalina)
Dubbed everything from the “city’s ambassador for Turkish food” (New York Magazine) to “one of the restaurant scene’s greatest and most befuddling characters” (The New York Times), Yegen has blazed through 13 Turkish establishments throughout Manhattan in 20 years—Divane, Effendi, Beyoglu and Sip Sak among them. He opened his fourteenth, Sea Salt, in the East Village, in July.
Yegen’s involvement with all of these restaurants has been characterized as much by his fiery, bombastic temperament as the black magic he performs on eggplants, lamb and yogurt. His cooking, which has elicited critical cries of ecstacy, is distinguished by subtlety and finesse.
The same cannot be said of his opinions, which he dispenses with the kind of unguarded excess most chefs reserve for salt and butter. Culinary school instructors? “Idiots.” Kebab Garden, the East Village eatery that New York Magazine recently spotlighted in its Cheap Eats issue? “Dog food.” Eric Ripert, the famed chef behind Le Bernardin? “I don’t want to be compared with him. He had his chance because Americans don’t know anything about fish.”
And Julia Child? “She was not a cook. She was a baker. Thank god she died.”
“I don’t give a shit if you like [my food]—this is my art,” he admits. “I have strong beliefs...so I never advertise.”
He doesn’t really need to. Yegen’s hit-and-run jobs of opening restaurants across the city have earned him a group of loyal eaters who will follow him anywhere, including the East Village. At Sea Salt, which is decorated in a sleek black-and-white palette, Yegen has turned his talents to seafood, serving dishes like whole salt-encrusted red snapper, grilled octopus and mussel dolmas.
Sea Salt is his second seafood restaurant—he opened his first, Deniz, in 1994—and is located in the space previously occupied by the second branch of Taksim, which was owned by Yegen’s old business partner. The partner, Yegen says, asked him to open a fish restaurant. So he did, taking inspiration from Trata, a posh Greek seafood restaurant on the Upper East Side. “I liked [Trata] from the outside,” Yegen says. The customers “were old rich people, like the people I’d like to serve.”
The people Yegen would like to serve provide a stark illustration of the pride and prejudice that define the 51-year-old cook—never call him a chef; it’s the cook, he claims, who has the talent. On one hand, Yegen, who was born into a wealthy Istanbul family, needs customers. But, he quickly points out, “I don’t need [their] money. I need my audience. Customers are my audience.” He professes a need to make people happy. “I will fight for you when you’re here,” he says, hand to his chest. But when you’re here, don’t cross the man by, say, ordering your swordfish medium-rare. “There is no medium-rare,” Yegen insists, “because I don’t eat that.” Yegen wants an audience—“Taste my art,” he implores—but he wants that audience to recognize his food, as, well, art.
Despite all of the bombast, the endless references to his God-given talent, the claims that he more or less invented the concept of grilling and serving whole fish to New Yorkers, Yegen seems tired, even a little worn down. He looks forward to his next and, he claims, last restaurant. The concept, he says, will be “only me—I want to be the only guy behind the counter. It’s going to be big.”
In the meantime, he’s got a lot of work to do at Sea Salt, where he spends most of his waking hours, obsessing over seasonings, firing chefs and performing for his audience. It’s a monumental task, running the restaurant. Yegen, somewhat unexpectedly, is the first to admit the limitations of his powers. “I’m a small man,” he says with a shrug. “I’m not a god.”
