Our Favorite Cafés in Cihangir, Istanbul

When traveling, we love hanging out at local cafes. Luckily for us, Istanbul has a great café culture. You can find cafés all over the city.

It’s tough to choose the best cafés from so many, but our favorite place to hang out was at three cafés in the Cihangir area. In fact, we could see these cafés from the living room window of our Airbnb apartment.

The three cafés are on the corners where five roads meet at the junction of Oba Sokak and Havyar Sokak.

My favorite was Havyar. It has a wide pavement outside the shop and is the perfect place for people watching. The coffee is great as well.

When I fancied a cookie with my coffee, we headed to Tea and Coffee. When I first saw the sign outside this café, I thought it meant that they sold tea and coffee, but Tea and Coffee is its name.

This is the café to head to if you prefer to drink tea, as they have a great selection.

The third café is 1 Kahve. This one looks to be the most popular of three, but that means that sometimes it’s difficult to get a good seat. It’s also the biggest of the three cafés.

All three are great and it was fun to try them all.

This area has so many other cafés that you could try a different one every day for months.

Cihangir is our favorite neighborhood in Istanbul and we plan to come back for an extended stay of a few months next year. There aren’t many place in the world where I’d feel comfortable living full time, but Cihangir is definitely a place I could settle down in long-term.

All three of these cafés are open from early morning until very late at night.