The story
A love song by Barış Manço, 1989. A man finally finds the courage to tell her how he feels, and right then a street vendor calls out «Domates, biber, patlıcan!». The moment is gone, the chorus stays.
Lokum · A roaming studio for Turkish food and culture
Thank you
Zurich
Hello Cape Town
Zürich & Palermo 2025–26Next: Cape Town, dates soon
What we do
We are not a restaurant. We borrow a place and its ritual, and build the food, the room and the night around it.
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Turkish cooking, broad and regional, vegetable-led and far beyond kebab. Every menu follows a season and a place.
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Turkish Wedding followed the phases of a relationship, the Turkish way. Music, light and mood moved with them: romantic on Wednesday, loud with DJs on Friday and Saturday.
Turkish Wedding
We dock onto what is already there. At the Flussbad Oberer Letten, Lido sat below the existing structure and kept the opening hours of its bar. In a restaurant that only opens at night, we served brunch, when it would otherwise stay closed.
Lido
At Officine Calderai in Palermo, every dish was shaped for the new plate series by Martinelli Venezia Studio.
Tutto bene
Evenings that build towards the dance floor, a playlist for home, and a tee named after Barış Manço’s song Domates, Biber, Patlıcan.
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table home
Merch shaped by Turkish food culture, by its music and by its play on words. Tap a piece to hear its story.
In the shop soon
The story
Sucuk is the spiced sausage of the Turkish breakfast table, sizzling in its own pan with eggs. The cap says out loud what everyone at the table is thinking.
The story
The same circle of words on heavy cotton in forest green, cut to be worn for years.
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Lokum, 2025–2026
Editions 2025–2026
Every edition
starts with
a place
Then a ritual: a wedding, a meyhane, a lido. We keep its structure and build the food, the room and the evening around it.
01 Turkish Wedding · The first edition
A wedding without a couple
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The menu stayed the same all week while the evenings shifted: quiet midweek, festive by the weekend, with music and movement building towards the end.
We took the form of the wedding, not its content. Turkish Wedding was not a celebration of marriage, but of being together.
It set the way LOKUM still works: take a ritual, keep its rhythm, and design the food, the table and the room around it.
02 Meyhane · Stereo Bar, Zürich
The bar before the bar
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Across Türkiye, a meyhane is where people gather for small plates, rakı, music and long evenings. Meze is not a starter here, but a way of eating slowly while the conversation never stops.
The menu was à la carte, so every table built its own spread. Many came for one drink before the bar began, stayed as the plates kept coming, and ended the night on the dance floor with the Stereo Bar crowd.
For the venue it meant hours that usually stand empty. For us it was a format: a bar can host a kitchen before it becomes a bar.
03 Çok güzel · Late summer into autumn
Richer as the days get shorter
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Ingredients changed, preparations became more refined, and the flavours moved towards a richer, more festive register.
The same table, a different season: the edition was about how a menu changes its voice when the weather does.
04 Tutto bene · Palermo
One city, three kitchens
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01 · Social kitchen
Moltivolti
Cooking with the existing crew of a social kitchen in Ballarò.
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02 · Design
Officine Calderai
Dishes shaped for the new plate series by Martinelli Venezia Studio.
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03 · Sea
Mare Memoria Viva
An open grill evening at Palermo’s ecomuseum of the sea.
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Moltivolti. In the Ballarò district, Moltivolti is a social enterprise with a restaurant and coworking space, founded by people of different nationalities to create work and exchange in the neighbourhood. We did not bring a team: we cooked with Moltivolti’s own crew, in their kitchen, for their guests.
Micromuseo Officine Calderai. Officine Calderai grew out of the metalworkers’ workshops of Via Calderai and is a project by designer Vittorio Venezia. Here we cooked for the new plate series by the design duo Martinelli Venezia Studio, Carolina Martinelli and Vittorio Venezia. Every dish followed the form and material of the plate it was served on, so the menu became a way of presenting the objects.
Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva. On Via Messina Marine, the urban ecomuseum collects the stories, photographs and voices of Palermo families and their life with the sea. On the old seaside promenade we closed the series with a loose, open grill evening.
Martinelli Venezia Studio ↗ Officine Calderai ↗ Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva ↗
05 Bahar · Spring
Spring, region by region
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It was built around vegetables at their peak and ingredients that are only around for a few weeks, with fish on the table as the season turned.
Not one regional style, but the way a whole country cooks when spring arrives, one region at a time.
06 Lido · Flussbad Oberer Letten, Summer 2026
The sea, brought back to the river
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In Sicily we had ended by the sea, grilling on a promenade. Back in Zürich, the Limmat became our seafront: a bar that followed the bathers, open from mid-May to early September whenever the weather allowed.
From June it ran Wednesday to Sunday, from noon until eight. On Sundays there was brunch, and on selected evenings the Limmat Delight supper club brought the long table down to the water.
07 Jdaburg, Zürich, October 2026
One last table for 2026
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Alongside it, the weekend brunch and day bar at Jdaburg ran until the final weekend of October: a Turkish breakfast served on a tepsi, and on Sundays a day bar with börek, dolma, meze, cocktails and rakı.
Then we closed the kitchen in Zürich. Thank you, Zurich. Next: Cape Town.
Practice
Editions
Temporary kitchens in places with a story of their own: a social kitchen, a design workshop, a museum, a riverbank, a bar before it opens
See editionsCollaborations
With designers, institutions, festivals and venues. We cook for their objects, rooms and communities, from a plate series to a programme
Work with usAtelier
Culinary direction where food meets space: concept, menu, scenography, table and food styling
Contact us
Lokum means
Turkish delight
A roaming studio for Turkish food and culture, founded in Zürich in summer 2025, working across cooking, scenography, architecture and design.
Read the story
What began in summer 2025 as a seasonal project keeps changing shape: a week-long wedding feast, a meyhane inside a bar, a series of one-day restaurants in Palermo, a meze bar on the river, a brunch table.
The constant is the method. Each edition starts from a place and a ritual, and the food, the table, the light, the sound and the timing are designed together. Turkish cuisine is our language: broad, regional, vegetable-led, and much more than kebab.
Next, LOKUM travels to Cape Town.
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to know
Cape Town is next. New editions and new pieces for the shop, first by email.
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