Memories of Flavor
Waking to a morning suffused with freshly baked bread. The smell of tomatoes still warm from the sun. Experiencing the way ingredients change form with time, with heat. With care.
Where Chef Ali grew up in Turkey, food was deeply rooted in daily life. It was part of what defined the culture, what made people who they were. Long Sunday lunches in the countryside were crowded with aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins, the young and the very old. A long table filled with mezzes, roasted meats, fresh vegetables, and homemade desserts. Everyone pitched in, everybody was part of the meal, creating an unforgettable sense of connection.
“These were the kinds of meals that stay with you throughout your life and shapes the way you think about food and togetherness,” Chef Ali says. “Food was everything. It was how we gathered, how we expressed love, and how we celebrated even the smallest moments. Meals were never rushed—they were conversations, laughter, and tradition, all at once.”
While some dishes reached across the landscape, each place had a distinct flavor, a pace of preparation, a certain unique deliberate thoughtfulness that went into feeding people. Food was about family and family values. How and what you fed people shaped the way they saw who you were.
“Sharing a meal is one of the purest forms of connection,” Chef Ali says. He became fascinated not just with tasting and eating, but with understanding why food could be what it is. As a teenager, he decided he would study it seriously, and committed to making it his life’s work.
Chef Ali studied Gastronomy and Culinary Arts at Yeditepe University in Istanbul. Later, he completed a Master’s in Food Science and Oenology at Johnson & Wales University in the U.S. That academic foundation, combined with over two decades of hands-on experience in kitchens, restaurants, and culinary travel around the world, shaped who I am as a chef.
Everywhere he went, a lesson reasserted itself—if perhaps the food of his youth and its preparation was unique to its place, the truth of his experience with it extended to everywhere he’s ever been.
“Food is universal,” he says. “Sharing food is sharing identity, history, and love. It’s one of the most intimate and generous things we can do for one another.”
His travels to Japan brought him in contact with the magic of matcha, experiencing the balance of energy, focus and flavor. He studied the wines of the Mediterranean, internalizing the concept of terroir as a living evolving expression of a place and a process. He immersed himself in the coffee of his home country, its unique preparation. He explored the tart citrus flavors of the Caribbean.
While working in kitchens in Europe, he discovered tapas, which resonated with his early memories of mezze culture. He began traveling through Spain, exploring from Barcelona to Madrid to the Basque Country. The honesty of Spanish tapas spoke to him.
The memories still feel as clear as the days the flavors exploded on his tongue. A warm evening in a tiny bar in Barcelona, a simple dish of anchovies, olives, and vermouth—a celebration of the perfection of simple ingredients.
San Sebastián, another small, family-run bar, another elegant, nearly perfect tapas meal: fewer than a dozen items on the menu, each bite simple but full of soul, built around extraordinary ingredients, a journey in flavor
From those earliest memories of his grandmother in the kitchen, stirring slow-cook dishes that had been passed down through generations, from mouth to mouth, to where he finds himself today, the richness of Chef Ali’s memories and his experience of what food means extends everywhere he’s gone.
It extends to Boca Raton, to Anyday, where Chef Ali diligently prepares a food he discovered in a faraway land for the people of this one. Today, his family is not so easy to gather together on Sundays. Still food is the glue that holds everything together. It’s how we spend quality time, how we care for each other, and how we express our roots, no matter where we live.
And if he can’t feed family every day, he can feed people any day, at Anyday, the food that has come to define who he is. Food as a means, but not an end, a continual expression of the belief that the care and intentionality with which he prepares meals can tell the story of his life, a story he can invite others into, can share with other people and create for them memories as powerful and rich as those he carries from a lifetime of flavor and connection.
