The story
Mengen Cookery and Tourism Festival in Mengen
The Mengen Cookery and Tourism Festival is held in Mengen, a small town in Bolu province nationally known as the historic training ground for Turkey's professional chefs, and centers on giant communal cooking demonstrations, chef competitions, and folk performances celebrating this centuries-old culinary reputation.
Mengen occupies a distinctive place in Turkish culinary history as the country's best-known source of professional chefs, a reputation that predates modern tourism marketing and traces back to a genuine historical labor pattern: for generations, men from this small Bolu province town left home to work as cooks, first in Ottoman palace and elite household kitchens, and later throughout the hotels, restaurants, and institutional kitchens of the modern Turkish Republic and beyond its borders.