Adding story to a flawless plate.

Producing content for Somer Sivrioğlu's Efendy is more than a restaurant shoot: you have to keep up with the standard of a chef who carried Anatolian cuisine onto the world stage. The plate is already flawless — your job is to turn that flawlessness into a story without breaking it.

The chef's rhythm

Chef Somer never stands still during service; he adjusts plates at the pass, serves tables himself, jokes with guests. That energy can't be staged — only caught. The strongest frames of the series were shot with documentary reflexes: the chef leaning over a table, giving a plate its final turn, talking with his team in the kitchen steam.

The light of the plates

Efendy's plates are colourful and layered — eggs over hummus, charred vegetables, kavurma on pide. We shot that richness in soft daylight without filling the shadows; the food's texture kept its own depth. For the rakı table chapter we dimmed the light and gave ourselves over to the dim intimacy of the table culture.

If the plate is already flawless, the photographer's job is to add story — not makeup.

Two films, one night

The films "Cinematic Dinner Experience" and "The Perfect Appetizer Moment" came out of the same service: one tells the rhythm of the table, the other the elegance of a single meze. Stills and film were produced the same night in the same light language — side by side in a feed they read as one series.