Rozbif Sandviç

The büfe window is lit past midnight when most of the street has gone dark, a glass case of cold cuts and a griddle behind it, and the rozbif sandviç is one of the cold orders pulled straight from that case. The name says what it is: rozbif is the Turkish spelling of roast beef, sandviç the Turkish spelling of sandwich, both borrowed whole from the European words. This is a cold, deli-style build, not a hot item chopped to order off a spit, and it sits on the cosmopolitan side of the country's sandwich culture, the world of café cases and packed lunch counters rather than the kebab cart.

The sandwich is the meat. Beef is roasted rare, cooled, and shaved thin against the grain on the deli blade, then folded in loose ribbons into a split length of Turkish ekmek or a soft white roll. The supporting cast stays light and cold: shredded lettuce, sliced tomato, thin onion or a few pickles, and a spread that runs from plain mayonnaise to a mustard-leaning sauce. Nothing is cooked when you order it. The point is a clean, brisk, cold sandwich assembled in seconds from a case that was prepared hours before.

Because the meat carries everything, the failures are all failures of the roast and the knife. Take the beef past rare and it goes grey and tight, and a thin shave of overcooked roast eats dry and stringy and pulls free in ragged threads. Cut it thick or with the grain and even a good roast turns chewy and tears loose from the bread in one chewy strip. The bread is the other trap: a length of ekmek gone stale crumbles and shreds, and a spread laid on too wet turns the crumb to paste under the cold meat. Done right, the rozbif stays pink and tender, sliced fine enough to fold so each bite gets several layers, the bread fresh enough to hold and the dressing thin enough to bind without soaking.

Cold is the whole register. The beef is cold and mild and yields easily under the teeth, the lettuce crisp and wet, the onion sharp, the pickle a vinegar snap against the meat. There is no steam, no grease down the wrist, none of the heat and mess of the griddle counter next door. The smell is faint, just cold beef and fresh bread and a little mustard. It eats quick and clean, a sandwich you finish standing at the counter or carry off to a desk, and the coolness is the point rather than a compromise.

Ordering one places you on a particular side of the büfe board. Rozbif is the cold pick at a counter built for heat, named at the window and shaved to order while the tost presses in the iron, the kokoreç gets chopped on the steel, the goralı runs its frankfurter, and the dilli kaşarlı stacks tongue under melted cheese. The cold cuts come from a şarküteri case, the deli counter that stocks rozbif beside salami and ham, and a büfe sandwich is built fast off squeeze bottles and bins while the line waits behind you. The cold rozbif is the café reading of the board, the one ordered by someone who wants meat and bread without the heat and smoke of the rest.

Its cousins sort by where the meat comes from and whether it is hot. The füme et sandviç swaps the rare roast for smoked beef and leans cured rather than fresh. The hindi sandviç runs the same cold deli build with sliced turkey. The pressed tost and the spit-carved döner are a different tradition entirely, hot meat off heat rather than cold meat off the blade, and a rozbif sandviç belongs with the cold case, not the griddle.

The build is the plainest kind of sandwich there is: a roll split and laid back over cold beef, bread on both faces of the filling, the European form the loanword carried in with it. That borrowing accounts for everything: a cold cut sliced thin, a roll, and a spread, the form carried over intact from the deli case it came out of. It is a roast beef sandwich that kept its foreign name and its foreign shape and simply found a home on a Turkish counter.

Origin and history

The word rozbif almost certainly entered Turkish through French rather than directly from English. In the late Ottoman period, French was the prestige European language in Istanbul's cosmopolitan Beyoglu district, then called Pera, and French rosbif was itself borrowed from English. The Levantine merchants and European residents who kept deli counters stocked the terminology alongside the meat, and by the time the term settled into Turkish spelling it had taken the French phonology rather than the English one. No single print attestation pins the adoption to a decade, and the route through French rather than English is an educated inference rather than a documented fact.

What is documented is the counter that carried it. In 1918, a German named Schutte opened a charcuterie in Beyoglu's Balik Pazari fish market and the shop took a Turkish pronunciation of his name: Sutte. It stocked salami, sausage, ham, and European cold cuts, all made from beef and chicken and sold fresh from the case, and by most accounts it was among the first establishments in the city to make that range of Western cold cuts a reliable retail fixture. Schutte eventually returned to Germany after World War II; the shop changed hands to Jifko Eldek in 1969 and has run continuously since, now with branches across the city. Whether Sutte ever sold rozbif specifically is not recorded, but the trade it anchored is the direct antecedent of every şarküteri case that stocks it today.

The sandwich form around that cold cut solidified later. Turkish sandwiches took their recognizable quick-food shape in the 1950s, the decade the büfe, the small glass-fronted kiosk selling cold cuts, tost, and bottled drinks, became a fixture of city life. Around Taksim and the Beyoglu squares the büfeler have run past midnight ever since, the şarküteri case and the griddle side by side on one counter, and the cold rozbif has sat in that case beside the salami and the smoked beef for as long as anyone at those counters can say.