What's Cooking, Habibi: How Queer Turkish Americans Are Reclaiming the Kitchen Table

The smell of menemen on a Sunday morning is, for Selin K., equal parts comfort and complicated. Growing up in her grandmother's apartment in Izmir, that scrambled egg and tomato dish was the smell of belonging — of being folded into something larger than yourself, the chaos of a full house, the specific warmth of being known. When Selin came out as a trans woman in her mid-twenties and moved to New York, she brought almost nothing with her. But she carried the menemen recipe in her hands, the way you carry muscle memory.

"The first time I made it in my apartment in Astoria, I cried," she says. "Not sad crying. Just — overwhelming. Like I was still connected to something I thought I'd lost."

Food does that. For Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans specifically, it does something even more layered.

The Table as a Contested Space

Let's be honest about what the family table has historically meant for a lot of queer people: it's been a place of performance. You sit down, you edit yourself, you pass. The food is good but you're not fully present because you can't be. The warmth of the meal exists alongside the chill of not being seen.

For Turkish queer immigrants, that dynamic gets further complicated by the specific weight of diaspora. You're already navigating what it means to be Turkish in America — the questions, the assumptions, the constant low-grade work of cultural translation. Add queerness to that, and the table becomes a genuinely complex place.

But here's what's interesting: food is also one of the most powerful tools for reclaiming that space.

"I started hosting dinners for other queer Turkish people in Chicago about three years ago," says Kaan B., a 31-year-old gay man originally from Ankara. "At first it was just an excuse to cook. But it became something else really fast. It became the table we never got to sit at."

Kaan's dinners — held in his Wicker Park apartment, usually for eight to twelve people — are elaborate, multi-hour affairs. Meze spreads. Slow-braised lamb. Homemade börek that takes most of the day to assemble. The cooking is the point, not just the eating.

Recipes as Inheritance, Resistance, and Reinvention

There's a particular kind of grief that comes with losing access to family recipes — not because the recipe is gone, but because the relationship is. Several Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans we spoke with described a period of estrangement from family after coming out, during which they also felt cut off from their culinary heritage. The food felt like it belonged to people who no longer fully claimed them.

Reclaiming it, then, becomes an act of resistance.

Zeynep A., a 28-year-old non-binary person living in Los Angeles, spent two years teaching themselves to cook Turkish food almost entirely from YouTube videos, diaspora food blogs, and the occasional painful phone call with a relative who didn't know the full story of their life.

"My mom and I don't talk much," Zeynep says carefully. "But I called her once, just to ask how she makes her cacık. That's it. We talked for forty-five minutes. The food gave us a way back into each other that nothing else had."

Zeynep now runs an Instagram account documenting their cooking, explicitly framed through a queer lens. Their captions regularly go deep — connecting a dish to a memory, a memory to a feeling, a feeling to a broader reflection on what it means to carry a culture inside your body when the culture doesn't fully carry you back.

Queering the Recipe

Not everyone is cooking grandma's recipes straight. Some Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans are doing something more playful and more pointed: taking traditional dishes and remaking them as explicitly queer acts.

This might sound abstract, but in practice it's actually pretty joyful. Think: a Pride-season spread of Turkish meze where every dish is named after a queer icon. A börek filled with ingredients sourced entirely from LGBTQ+-owned businesses. A dinner party where the meal is structured around Turkish folk songs and everyone has to share a memory connected to a dish.

"Food is a language," says Defne M., a 34-year-old lesbian chef who trained in Istanbul and now runs a pop-up supper club in Brooklyn. "And like any language, you can say new things with it. You can tell stories that weren't told before."

Defne's supper clubs are intentionally designed as safe spaces — not just for Turkish LGBTQ+ people, but for anyone who wants to sit at a table where the food carries that particular weight and warmth. Her menus are written in both Turkish and English, and she always includes a short note about the cultural history of each dish. "I want people to eat with context," she says. "I want the food to mean something beyond just tasting good."

The New Table

What does chosen family look like when it gathers around a Turkish spread? It looks like Kaan's apartment in Chicago, where a dozen queer Turkish Americans are passing around a plate of sigara böreği and someone is telling a story about their grandmother that makes the whole room go quiet. It looks like Zeynep's kitchen in Los Angeles at midnight, flour on every surface, a FaceTime call with a friend in Istanbul propped up against the backsplash. It looks like Defne's supper club, where strangers become something more than strangers over shared plates and the particular intimacy of eating together.

The table has always been contested territory. But it's also always been a place where something real can happen — where people can be fed, in every sense of the word.

For Turkish LGBTQ+ Americans, reclaiming it isn't just about the food. It's about insisting that they belong to their own culture, on their own terms, with their full selves present. And then cooking something incredible to celebrate it.