Andrew Finkel

A friend once confessed the frustration of setting a story in Istanbul, a city where not even the past stands still. The place you think you should start is never the place you actually start – and umpteen drafts later you find yourself starting from somewhere different again. And so it proved the case when I set out to write my novel, The Adventure of the Second Wife. It takes place partly among the arcane world of Sherlock Holmes devotees but also in different eras of Istanbul.

Readers of Cornucopia might think they need no introduction to the work of Monica Fritz. For the last decade she has been photographer at large for this magazine, returning from assignments with sharp, often playful, but always unaffected takes on her subject matter. Her repertoire, from portraiture to mosque furniture, from landscape to cityscape is vast. And stylish.

Rutin is a tiny, determinedly informal restaurant in a wiggly backstreet of Istanbul’s Beyoğlu. It translates as “routine,” but this strikes me as being a misnomer for what is in many ways a puzzling establishment. Far from being humdrum, Rutin appears to be out on a limb, almost defiant in avoiding being slotted in any well-established genre. For a start, Rutin does not go out of its way to impress.