Ayasofya is Kalamazoo's only Turkish restaurant, and its owners, Halil and Fatma Dursunoğlu, feel that responsibility every time someone walks through the door.
For many customers, lunch at Ayasofya has served as an introduction to gobit doner, to lahmacun, and to a whole cuisine some customers didn't even know they'd been missing.
"When you are the only one responsible to represent the Turkish food... you need to think like 100 times more than normal," Fatma said. "I have more responsibility to let them taste good food."
The husband and wife team didn't set out to run a restaurant. Fatma's an environmental engineer who spent ten years working with the United Nations on desertification and erosion. But when she moved to Michigan, she was pregnant and craving lahmacun, Turkish flatbread topped with minced meat. She couldn't find it anywhere, so she decided to make it herself.
The couple opened Ayasofya while Fatma was nine months pregnant. One day, while preparing food for a customer, she went into labor. After giving birth, she was back in the kitchen within two weeks.
"Actually, she went to labor literally from the kitchen," Halil said. "I still remember that day."
The restaurant sits in the old Bruno's pizzeria space, a spot generations of WMU students knew and loved. Fatma and her husband Halil, who teaches computer science and cybersecurity at Western, kept the plates, the forks, even the oven.
"We respect their memory," Fatma said.
On this episode, we're in the kitchen for the making of gobit doner, a Turkish sandwich filled with shaved meat, fries, pickles, lettuce, tomato, onions, mayo and fresh-baked flatbread. And Fatma and Halil talk about that it means to be the only one carrying the Turkish cuisine's reputation on your shoulders.
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