Şemsa Denizsel

Şemsa Denizsel has cooked all her life. Food, eating and living well has always been a particular passion in her family. At the age of 32 she opened a restaurant called Kantin with the aim of cooking the food she wanted to eat and to serve it the way she wanted her food to be served. For almost two decades she cooked just with local ingredients and only whatever was in season. She was and still is an advocate of ‘food should be about what geography provides’. She is a pioneer in Istanbul’s gastronomy and is known as Alice Waters of Turkey.
After 18 years she closed her now legendary restaurant Kantin to follow her new dream of living in an olive grove teaching and creating a community in the Northern Aegean. That dream is called “Kitchen at the Olive Grove”