In our quest to find the best tea in Istanbul, my friends and I recently stopped by Van Sofrasi, a restaurant chain named after the eastern province of Van famous for its lavish morning feasts. Unfortunately, as it turns out, we found that it is merely an urban myth that the smuggled mahogany-colored tea from Iran and Syria is the best.
As we sat down, a news reporter on TV announced that a truck loaded with smuggled cigarettes worth 4 million Turkish lira (about $1.5 million) had been seized in the largely Kurdish southeastern province of Diyarbakir.
