The Piyaz Pilgrimage

Tahinli Piyaz is Antalya's dish the way pasty is Cornwall's - everyone makes it, everyone has an opinion on it, and restaurants have been competing over theirs for generations. It's a white bean salad, but that undersells it completely: the beans are dressed in a sharp, nutty tahini sauce with lemon juice and vinegar, then piled with chopped boiled eggs, ripe tomatoes, raw onion and flat-leaf parsley. The tahini is what makes it Antalya's own - piyaz exists across Turkey, but the tahini version is specific to this stretch of the Mediterranean coast, where the quality of the local sesame makes the sauce sing. It's traditionally eaten alongside şiş köfte (charcoal-grilled meatball skewers), the two dishes forming a set that every Antalya restaurant serves and every local orders without thinking.

Antalya is the longest flight on the map and worth every minute. The old town (Kaleiçi) tumbles down a cliff to a Roman harbour, the Taurus Mountains rise behind the city, and the Mediterranean stretches out turquoise and endless in front. Eating piyaz and köfte at a family-run restaurant that's been making the same dish since the 1930s, with the old harbour below and a Turkish tea to follow, is the kind of meal that justifies the flight time before you've finished the first bite.