Fuaye

Fuaye is an imitation-French restaurant in Istanbul whose changing fortunes and recurring place in Kemal’s life make it more than a fashionable dining room. It is first associated with the confidence and social rituals surrounding his engagement to Sibel, then becomes a setting where consumer status, friendship, and public scandal press upon him. The restaurant’s eventual disappearance from fashion contrasts with the objects Kemal’s story rescues from oblivion.

Setting and Social Identity

Kemal describes Fuaye as one of the European-style restaurants favored by a small, wealthy circle in neighborhoods such as Beyoğlu, Şişli, and Nişantaşı. Its name means a lobby, as do the names of other establishments such as Kulis and Merdiven: rather than adopting grandiose Western titles, these restaurants suggested the feeling of being on Europe’s edge while remaining in Istanbul. Their cosmopolitan effect was part of their appeal to affluent diners.

That taste did not endure unchanged. The next generation of nouveaux riches preferred restaurants with more ostentatiously traditional names, including Hanedan, Hünkar, Pasha, Vezir, and Sultan, and food presented as familiar home cooking. Under pressure from this new fashion, Fuaye sank into obscurity. Its history therefore registers a shift not simply in restaurant names but in how Istanbul’s wealthy chose to stage their relationship to Europe and to local tradition.

Engagement, Gifts, and the Display of Taste

Fuaye enters Kemal’s account amid the preparations for his formal engagement to Sibel. Over dinner with their parents, the couple discussed the party planned for mid-June, including arrangements intended to accommodate Sibel’s friend Nurcihan, who would travel from France. Sibel’s engagement dress was to be made by Silky İsmet, and she and Kemal’s mother considered how to sew the pearls his mother had given her onto it. The setting belongs to a world in which a family celebration could be planned as an elaborate public display: Sibel’s father wanted the engagement party to rival a wedding, while Kemal’s father was charmed by her Paris education.

After supper, as Kemal walked Sibel home along Valikonağı Avenue, she noticed a Jenny Colon handbag in a shop window. He returned the next day and bought it for her. On the evening of that purchase, dinner at Fuaye became the setting for a conversation about where the couple would meet before marriage. Kemal suggested his mother’s flat in the Merhamet Apartments, which looked out over a garden; Sibel wondered whether he anticipated a delay in their moving into a home of their own after the wedding. The exchange shows how the proposed private arrangement existed alongside their public plans for marriage.

The handbag made the difference between apparent and recognized status tangible. Sibel appreciated Kemal’s thoughtfulness but explained that the bag was an imitation, not a genuine Jenny Colon, and that she could not carry it to their engagement party. She pointed to the label’s stitching and compared its cheap thread with the stitching on a genuine bag she had bought in Paris. Her expertise exposed the limits of Kemal’s purchase: the gift could resemble a luxury object but would not withstand the scrutiny of the occasion. The episode also touches the couple’s different insecurities about class. Sibel’s family had lost its land and fortune, while Kemal’s family wealth came from generations in cloth manufacture; although his family had prospered spectacularly, the counterfeit still unsettled him.

The Restaurant and Kemal’s Divided Intimacy

Fuaye also links Kemal’s engagement to the secret relationship he has with Füsun. At another dinner there, Sibel gave him a fragrance called Spleen, purchased in Paris. Kemal says he did not usually like wearing fragrance, but one morning he dabbed some on his neck. After he and Füsun made love, she noticed it and asked whether Sibel had bought the cologne. The gift travels from a public dinner into a private encounter, carrying evidence of Kemal’s two relationships with it.

The restaurant’s social world is also connected to the elaborate engagement party planned at the Hilton Hotel, Istanbul. Because the state strictly limited imported foreign alcohol, hosts arranging a large celebration had to seek champagne, whiskey, and other European drinks through personal contacts and black-market supply. Delicatessens in wealthy neighborhoods and fashionable hotel bars might have such goods even when legal imports were scarce. In Kemal’s account, the effort to serve imported drinks and the society pages’ interest in whether they were genuinely foreign show how consumption at a celebration could become a public test of wealth and distinction. Fuaye belongs to the same milieu of European-coded taste, even when the practical arrangements for displaying it took place elsewhere.

Return, Estrangement, and a Changed Atmosphere

Years later, Kemal meets Zaim at Fuaye for a long lunch to discuss Meltem’s advertising problem. Meltem is struggling against Coca-Cola, and Zaim explains that the rival brand gives distributors credit and supplies free Plexiglas shop signs, calendars, and promotional gifts. He argues that young consumers are drawn to Coca-Cola, even when a Turkish-made drink is cheaper and healthier. Kemal admits that, on the rare occasions when he drinks soda, he chooses Coca-Cola too. The conversation about competition thus becomes a meeting between old friends whose shared business world no longer guarantees shared loyalties: Papatya, directed by Feridun, has been contracted by Lemon Films for Meltem’s campaign.

On this return, Fuaye looks to Kemal as though time has marked it. Its cyclamen vases, plain walls, and fashionable lamps call up pleasant memories, but the crowded restaurant seems time-worn and to have aged without grace. He imagines that one day he might sit there with Füsun, able to enjoy simply being together. The wish is still only an imagined future, set against the place’s visible decline and his unsettled present.

A later meal with Zaim makes the restaurant a site of confrontation. Zaim explains that people sympathize with Sibel because Kemal became engaged to her, lived with her in a Bosphorus yali, shared her bed, and then abandoned her. Kemal protests, but the conversation leaves him silent and angry. He hears the waiter's hurried footsteps, the steady murmur of conversation and laughter, and the clatter of knives and forks; in the middle of this familiar public room, he vows never to return even as he recognizes how much he loves it and how little other world he has.

The encounter deepens his estrangement from the circle Fuaye represents. When Hilmi and his wife stop by the table, their fine clothes strike Kemal as pretentious, even false. He feels shame at having spoken in the language of society gossip and longs instead for the world he shared with Füsun in Çukurcuma. At the door, he and Zaim embrace and kiss each other on the cheeks before walking in opposite directions. Two weeks later, Kemal learns that Zaim and Sibel have been a couple for some time. Fuaye is not the cause of their separation, but its dinners frame the loss of an old friendship and the news that makes that loss more final.

Preserved Objects and Narrative Significance

The narrator returns to Fuaye not only in memory but through material evidence. After a long search, he exhibits an illustrated menu, an advertisement, a matchbook, and a napkin from the restaurant. These modest remnants give the vanished dining room a place in the Museum of Innocence: its history survives not as an intact fashionable venue but as a handful of things that once belonged to it.

That act of preservation suits the restaurant’s role in Kemal’s narrative. Fuaye embodies a social world that repeatedly changes its fashions and leaves places behind, while the collected objects hold details of particular meals, relationships, and moments of recognition. The restaurant can decline into oblivion as a business and a trend, yet its objects allow the story to return to its rooms: to engagement plans, a gift judged by its stitching, a scent that betrays a secret, and a friendship strained at the dinner table. In this way Fuaye joins the book’s broader attention to the capacity of ordinary things to preserve a life that public fashion has moved beyond.