Chef Orhan Yegen, Owner Of Lokanta In Astoria, Dies

ASTORIA, QUEENS — Acclaimed Turkish chef Orhan Yeğen, whose Astoria restaurant Lokanta won praise from The New York Times and The New Yorker, died Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 65.

Yeğen grew up in Adana, Turkey. In 1977, he fled political turmoil in Turkey and moved to New York City, where he got a job as a bus boy in a Turkish restaurant and started learning about the restaurant business, according to the Lokanta website.

During his 43-year culinary career, he worked at more than 100 restaurants and opened many of his own, first in New Jersey and then in New York City.

"You only learn by trying," Yegen once said. "Once you know the right flavor you can try to recreate it. You memorize the ingredients and the combinations and the culture of the food. And then when you decide to be a cook, you learn the skill."

Fuat Kircaali, a longtime friend, told Patch he met Yeğen in 1985 while renting an apartment above the chef's first restaurant, an Italian eatery in Hoboken, New Jersey.

A fire eventually claimed both Yeğen's restaurant and Kircaali's apartment, but the men stayed friends and the chef bounced back with a new restaurant called Turkish Kitchen in Weehawken.

"Orhan was a perfectionist," Kircaali told Patch. "[He] personally greeted his guests every night at his restaurants."

In 2004, he opened the restaurant Sip Sak in Turtle Bay, where he served his interpretations of classic Turkish dishes.

His career reached new heights with the opening of his restaurant Lokanta last year in Astoria, where his slow-cooked lamb dishes and sheep's head soup earned him two stars from famed New York Times food critic Pete Wells.

"I am a genius," he reportedly told Wells when the critic asked if the soup was filling. "And even I don’t know how to answer this question. I think that the question must be wrong."

He is survived by his wife.

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