Hande Bozdoğan

Chef and founder of the Istanbul Culinary Institute (Golden Horn)

Inspired by her chef’s training at New York’s French Culinary Institute, Hande Bozdoğan founded the Istanbul Culinary Institute in 2007 where young cooks learned their trade by developing the daily menu of a restaurant, Enstitü (in the Pera district at the time). It worked, and the restaurant had a guaranteed supply of chefs. Now that chef training is part of the syllabus of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University, Hande has thrown herself into a new training project: organising workshops at her own farm to the west of Istanbul. These look at cooking from the beginning, right where it starts, as close as possible to the produce and with one’s feet in the soil.