Luxury & Fine Dining Restaurants of Antalya

Antalya's serious restaurants are concentrated in a very small area. Almost everything worth booking sits inside Kaleici, the walled old town, in a grid of lanes you can cross in ten minutes, and several of them face each other across the same street. The style is Mediterranean rather than strictly Turkish: seafood from the bay, vegetables from the greenhouse belt west of the city, and kitchens that have absorbed as much from Italy and France as from Ottoman cooking. What follows is arranged by street, because that is how you will actually navigate it.

Arma

Arma occupies the cliff edge above the Kaleici Yat Limani, at Selcuk Mahallesi, Iskele Caddesi No:75, with a terrace built into stone arches directly over the old harbour. It is the seafood address in the city: carpaccio, lobster, salt-baked fish, alongside a broader Mediterranean and Turkish menu. The view does a lot of the work, and the prices reflect that, but the fish is bought locally and handled properly.

Seraser

On Karanlik Sokak No:18 in the Tuzcular quarter, Seraser works out of a restored Ottoman house, with a courtyard that opens in summer and a heavily decorated dining room for the rest of the year. The kitchen describes its cooking as world cuisine with Ottoman touches, which in practice means European technique applied to Turkish ingredients. It is the most formal room in Kaleici and the one most likely to need a reservation.

Vanilla

Vanilla has been open on Hesapci Sokak No:33 since 2007, run by a British chef, and it is the closest thing in the old town to a modern European restaurant. The menu is international rather than regional - grills, seafood, a proper vegetarian section - served in a stone house lit low enough that most people photograph the food badly. It opens at midday and runs until late, which makes it one of the few places here that works for lunch as well as dinner.

Gazetta Brasserie

Directly opposite Vanilla at Hesapci Sokak No:32, Gazetta is the Italian-leaning option: pizza and pasta alongside Mediterranean plates, stone walls, low lighting and live music on some evenings. It is a brasserie in the loose sense - you can eat a full meal or just sit with a plate and a glass - and it is considerably less formal than its neighbour across the lane.

Il Vicino Pizzeria

Il Vicino sits on Pasa Camii Sokak No:12, with outdoor tables under vines against a stone wall and a wine list longer than a pizzeria strictly needs. It is not fine dining and does not pretend to be; the pizzas come out of a conventional oven rather than a wood-fired one, which is worth knowing before you order. As a straightforward lunch between the more expensive dinners, it does the job.

Pio Gastro Bar & Bistro

A few doors along from Seraser at Karanlik Sokak No:9, Pio is the modern counterweight to the old-town restoration restaurants: contemporary interior, large paintings, a cocktail list taken as seriously as the food, and a menu that moves between Mediterranean, European and international plates. It stays busy later than most kitchens in the quarter.

Kaleici Steak Gastro Bar

The steak specialist of the old town, working with prime beef cuts and lamb in a room of stone walls and modern furniture. If the rest of Kaleici's menus feel fish-heavy, this is the alternative, and portions are sized accordingly.

What Mediterranean cooking means here

The regional style rests on three things. The first is seafood: Antalya sits on the bay, and grilled sea bass, calamari and shrimp casseroles are on almost every menu in the old town. The second is produce. Antalya province is the centre of Turkish greenhouse farming, and the vegetables reaching city kitchens - tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, greens - are grown within an hour or two of the table, which is why salads and olive-oil vegetable dishes are treated as courses rather than side plates. The third is meze, the spread of small cold dishes that opens a meal: stuffed vine leaves, bean and yoghurt dishes, hummus, and cacik, the yoghurt-and-cucumber dish that is the Turkish equivalent of Greek tzatziki. Rosemary, thyme and oregano do most of the seasoning work; olive oil replaces butter almost everywhere.

Practical notes

• Book ahead for the sea-view tables in July and August, at Arma in particular. Walk-ins are usually fine at lunch.
• Dinner runs late. Kitchens fill after nine and most stay open past midnight in summer.
• Dress is smart-casual at the top end; nowhere in Kaleici requires a jacket.
• Prices in the old town are well above the city average - you are partly paying for the setting, and the same cooking costs less a few streets outside the walls.

The advantage of Kaleici is its density: every kitchen above stands within a ten-minute walk of the old harbour, so an evening can be decided on arrival rather than booked from home. Boats tie up directly beneath the walls, and many charter guests exploring Turkey by gulet combine their days at sea with an evening here before the boat leaves for the next bay in the morning.