The first lesson the city of Gaziantep in southeastern Türkiye teaches a visitor is that food is not merely served, it is deployed.
It arrives with ceremony, confidence, memory, and, occasionally, a quantity that can test the diplomatic endurance of even the most seasoned foodies. Before one has finished admiring the first plate, another appears. Then another. Yoghurt comes thick and cool, mixed with herbs and tiny meatballs, appearing to a South Asian palate as an aristocratic cousin of the raita. Then lahmacun, kebabs, roasted peppers, pistachio sweets, coffee, and the kind of baklava that makes one briefly reconsider all previous desserts as clerical errors.
I had come to this southeastern Turkish city with a small group of journalists based in Ankara and Istanbul to attend Türkiye’s Gastrodiplomacy Model: Table and Heritage, organised as part of Turkish Cuisine Week. The programme was held under the patronage of Turkish first lady Emine Erdoğan and brought together officials, chefs, academics, food writers, business owners, journalists, and content creators.
The choice of Gaziantep was deliberate. It is Türkiye’s food capital, a city whose identity is inseparable from its kitchens, bazaars, copperware, pistachios, and ancient routes of exchange.
Gaziantep is often described as the Samarkand of the West, a phrase that may sound like tourist brochure embroidery until one walks through its old quarters. This was a city shaped by the Silk Routes, where traders, travellers, armies, and empires converged between Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, and the Arab world. Spices, grains, stories, and recipes passed through here.
Dr Fulya Harp Çelik, a faculty member in gastronomy and culinary arts at Hasan Kalyoncu University, said the city has a natural advantage because of its history, geography, and rich cuisine.
In the old bazaars, copper craftsmen still hammer trays by hand. Shops overflow with dried peppers, pistachios, herbs, and sweets. Smoke rises slowly from grills. Baklava dough is rolled until it becomes almost transparent. The city’s famous pistachio appears not as decoration but as identity.
Historic cafe
The city also houses the historic Tahmis Coffee House, which historians proudly describe as one of the world’s oldest continuously operating coffee houses, serving customers since 1635. In its old wooden interior, Turkish coffee is still served in small copper cups. One imagines merchants, storytellers, and travellers sitting there centuries ago, arguing over prices, politics, and perhaps the correct proportion of cardamom.
The event showed that Türkiye has realised that cuisine can do what many official statements cannot. It can reach ordinary people without translation. It can soften images, create curiosity, and turn geography into appetite.
Tahmis Coffee House in Gaziantep. Historians proudly describe it as one of the world’s oldest continuously operating coffee houses, serving customers since 1635
| Photo Credit:
Ifthikar Gilani
Dr Çelik captured this ambition in one memorable line to visiting journalists: “If the world were a house, the kitchen of that house would be Gaziantep.”
At first, it sounded like local pride expanding beyond measurable limits. But after several days in the city, it became difficult to dismiss the comment. Gaziantep does not simply cook—it remembers through cooking.
Gastronomy writer and researcher Özden Mermer Özsabuncuoğlu explained that the city’s cuisine was shaped by geography, trade, and season. Lahmacun, she said, is different in summer and winter. Food changes with climate, harvest, mood, and memory. “People of Gaziantep have turned food into art,” she said. “They live to eat rather than eat to live.”
For Türkiye, the Gaziantep event was not only about celebrating kebabs, baklava, and pistachios. It was about placing Turkish cuisine inside a larger global conversation on soft power. Countries across the world have discovered that the road to influence does not always pass through military bases, trade agreements, or stern declarations at summits. Sometimes it passes through the stomach.
Italy has long lived off the global romance with pasta, olive oil, and espresso. France turned cuisine into a civilisational claim. Japan elevated sushi, tea, and ramen into cultural exports. South Korea invested heavily in taking kimchi, Korean barbecue, and hansik to the world. Thailand used state-backed culinary promotion to expand Thai restaurants internationally. China has used banquets as theatre since imperial times and, more recently, as carefully choreographed statecraft.
Türkiye is now entering that arena with a strong hand. Its cuisine has the advantage of historical depth and geographical spread, carrying Central Asian memories, Ottoman palace traditions, Mediterranean produce, Balkan influences, Arab flavours, Anatolian grains, Islamic dietary habits, and the habits of countless communities that lived under or alongside the Ottoman order.
“Turkey can unite at many points in terms of gastrodiplomacy, since it is always a mediator in normal diplomacy and has a very rich cuisine,” Dr Çelik said.
“If we express ourselves in this arena, we can really come to very different places in our own advertising and branding,” she added.
Indian contrast
And here lies the contrast that should trouble India.
At a time when Türkiye is proudly presenting its cuisine as a diplomatic instrument, India, which possesses perhaps the most diverse culinary civilisation in the world, appears increasingly hesitant, even shy, about showing its own food to the world in its full splendour.
Menu for a lunch hosted by the Indian Prime Minister for the President of Cyprus.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy: Ifthikar Gilani
The menu on offer when Seychelles President Patrick Herminie came visiting.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy: Ifthikar Gilani
From Kashmiri wazwan to Hyderabadi biryani, from Lucknow’s kebabs to Kerala’s fish curries, from Bengali mustard hilsa to Chettinad pepper chicken, from Goan vindaloo to Punjabi tandoori food, from Rajasthani laal maas to Assamese bamboo shoot preparations, from Moplah cuisine to Awadhi korma, India possesses a range that few countries can match.
Even its vegetarian traditions are astonishingly varied: Gujarati thalis, Tamil temple food, Kashmiri nadru, Maharashtrian snacks, Bengali shukto, Rajasthani gatte, Punjabi sarson ka saag, Karnataka’s bisi bele bath, and countless dal, rice, bread, and vegetable combinations shaped by region, caste, climate, and faith.
Yet recent Indian state banquets often suggest a nervousness about showcasing India’s plurality through food. Instead of showcasing India’s varied cuisine, they seem to have become agricultural exhibitions.
French President Emmanuel Macron was reportedly so underwhelmed after the G20 banquet at Rashtrapati Bhavan that he ordered food after returning to his hotel. Similar murmurs have travelled through diplomatic circles about other visiting delegations.
The grapevine claims that Seychelles President Patrick Herminie ordered dinner from room service after he attended a banquet in New Delhi.
The menu at his table read like a poem. WHITE PUMPKIN and COCONUT SOUP with mini idiyappam and curry leaf oil. Koshambari with charred pineapple and yogurt foam, billed as “our take” on a South Indian salad. Another such menu offered yoghurt foam, stuffed bottle gourd, unheard of even for strict vegetarian people.
The problem is not vegetarian food. The problem is when food becomes so sanitised, portioned, and conceptually burdened that the guest begins to feel he is eating a government note.
Food diplomacy and Kashmir
There was a time when India understood food diplomacy instinctively. Perhaps the finest example remains Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Srinagar in December 1955.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ensured that Khrushchev’s visit to India included Kashmir, then a deeply contested question at the UN. In Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir Prime Minister Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad hosted him with Kashmiri warmth and a wazwan spread that has since entered diplomatic folklore. The most famous image from that visit shows Bakshi feeding Khrushchev goshtaba, the rich Kashmiri meatball cooked in yoghurt and spices, almost thrusting it affectionately into the Soviet leader’s mouth.
It was a photograph made for history: a Kashmiri host, a Soviet strongman, a meatball heavy with symbolism, and a dispute waiting at the UN.
Soon afterwards, the Soviet Union began vetoing Western-backed resolutions on Kashmir at the UN Security Council. Of course, history was not changed by a single goshtaba. Superpowers do not reorder policy because they have been well fed, though some Kashmiris may still insist that a properly made goshtaba can move hearts that are harder than the ones Marxist-Leninist doctrine ever did.
It is an embarrassment shaped partly by ideology and partly by image. The current political climate has made many of India’s finest food traditions difficult to present officially because they are associated with Muslim, Mughal, regional, tribal, Christian, coastal, or meat-eating cultures. But to remove them from the national table is to mutilate India’s own history.
Gaziantep’s confidence lies precisely in its refusal to flatten itself. The city does not deny that it was shaped by Arabs, Ottomans, Anatolians, Kurds, Armenians, merchants, refugees, craftsmen, Muslims, the empire, and trade. It absorbs these histories into its cuisine and offers them proudly. There is no nervous attempt to purify the plate.
India, by contrast, increasingly risks doing to its food what politics has done to its history: editing out the inconvenient layers.
This is especially tragic because the world already loves Indian food. In London, New York, Toronto, Dubai, Johannesburg, Doha, Singapore, and Melbourne, Indian restaurants are not exotic curiosities. They are part of the global urban landscape. Chicken tikka masala, biryani, dosa, samosa, butter chicken, vindaloo, naan, dal, chaat, and chai are already informal ambassadors. Indian spices have travelled farther than many diplomats.
In diplomacy, details linger. A visiting leader might forget the second paragraph of a joint statement, but he may remember whether dinner felt warm or austere.
The late diplomat Satinder Lamba used to tell a wonderful story from Kyrgyzstan, where he was once served a sheep’s eye by President Askar Akayev. Diplomatic courtesy required him to swallow it. When asked how it tasted, he could hardly insult the host, so he praised it. The delighted President gave him another.
The host was offering what he considered honour and had cultural meaning. But Lamba’s discomfort became part of the comedy of diplomacy.
The world does not need India to pretend to be a minimalist Scandinavian tasting room. It needs India to be generous, argumentative, fragrant, regional, excessive, contradictory, hospitable, and memorable.
But experts say the deeper issue is confidence. Türkiye, through Gaziantep, is showing confidence in its food as a lived culture. India, despite possessing a greater culinary universe, is increasingly presenting food as controlled messaging.
The banquet table should show that India’s plurality is not feared but celebrated. A Muslim dish need not threaten a Hindu dish. A meat preparation need not erase a vegetarian one. A millet can sit beside a kebab. A Kashmiri goshtaba can coexist with Gujarati kadhi. A Kerala fish curry can share the table with a Tamil vegetable stew. That is India.
Gaziantep offers a reminder that the world’s most effective food diplomacy does not begin with insecurity. It begins with the pleasure of sharing. Türkiye is telling the world that its cuisine is a bridge across cultures, a memory of empire and migration, and an invitation to understand the country beyond headlines.
And perhaps, somewhere in the archives of diplomatic wisdom, the ghost of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad is still holding out a goshtaba, reminding Delhi that history sometimes turns not on what is said across the table, but on what is served upon it.
Iftikhar Gilani is an Indian journalist based in Ankara.
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