Cafés, restaurants and even tea houses are still closed in Turkey. After a long lockdown during Ramadan, the shops are now open again, but food can only be delivered. Golden times for the Thuisbezorgd apps that make profiteering.
But the deliverers and the restaurants are the losers of the gig-economy. Delivery drivers have to pay for a scooter with their own money, when they are hit or die exhausted in the steep streets of Istanbul, that is their own problem. The delivery company doesn’t get any flowers, let alone health insurance or paid salary. It can be over at any time for a restaurant. When a customer who has turned up complains about too much or too little salt in a soup, the rating goes down and you can close the place.
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When I was staying somewhere near Izmir a few weeks ago I got hungry at night. I checked one of the delivery apps. There was only one restaurant nearby, a burger joint. The app promised to deliver it within 15 minutes. There is something sad about it, getting rid of a hamburger in a hotel room. And so I got into the car, rushed to the address, a sort of deserted industrial estate, and went to collect it myself. The man who opened the door was amazed. “Nobody comes to collect anything these days,” he said. “But just sit down.”
The burger place turned out to be a Turkish family business. Five young children were playing in the hall, two brothers baked the burgers, Grandpa the fries, a sister the salad and two other women were busy packing all the orders. I played with the kids, it wasn’t long before closing. Every now and then the brothers and the women looked at me as if I were something special. Someone who does not have his food delivered, but picks it up himself. It took a long time, one of the children had fallen asleep.
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The boy who opened the door came to me. “Do you really want a hamburger?” he asked. I looked at him questioningly. “We don’t like burgers. I mean, we make them, but the sun has just set and we have a whole iftar meal ready. Don’t you just want to join us?”
And so I ate with the whole family in the kitchen. With four young children, two brothers, their two wives, an aunt and grandfather. We had a fantastic meal, without burgers, without fries. “There is simply more money in those burgers,” said one of the brothers. “But believe me, if you bake those things all day, you don’t like them anymore.”
It was a fantastic evening. Five stars.
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