Asmalımescit and Nevizade are two clusters of narrow Beyoğlu alleys, a short stroll apart, packed with the old taverns Istanbul calls meyhanes — Persian for wine-house. Come at dusk and the lanes tighten with tables, cats threading between chairs while waiters balance trays of meze. Rakı arrives clear and clouds to milky white as water goes in, and it is sipped slowly across a whole evening, never gulped. Roaming musicians stop to play fasıl, the old classical repertoire, and glasses rise to cries of şerefe.
The two lanes form the surviving core of a tavern culture that grew out of the mixed Greek, Armenian and Levantine quarters of old Pera, whose families kept the taverns because alcohol sat outside Muslim practice. Nevizade runs behind the Galatasaray fish market and borrows its name from an Ottoman poet. Asmalımescit, down by Tünel, takes its name from a small mosque once wrapped in grapevines, and spent much of the twentieth century as a haunt of writers and painters before nightlife took over. Fashions come and go and the city has shuffled the tables more than once, but the long table and the unhurried drink endure.