David Hagerman for The New York Times
Hamsi tava, or anchovies dipped in corn flour and fried, at Emre Balikcilik, in Giresun.
"SO you're here for anchovies," said the bartender at Sehrazade, a shadowy spot in Unye, Turkey, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
With his boxer's nose and stern mien, the beefy man looked more gangster than barkeep. But when I told him why I'd come to this small town on Turkey's Black Sea coast, he showed a softer side. He nodded slowly and reached into his pocket for a phone.
Twenty minutes later a uniformed schoolboy burst into the bar (397A Hukumet Caddesi) with an aluminum baking pan. My new friend took the pan and placed it before me, removing its lid with a flourish and releasing a plume of steam. Inside was a little over a pound of lightly charred anchovies, each no longer than my pinkie, stacked dorsal fin to belly along wooden skewers.
"Eat, eat!" he urged, squeezing a wedge of lemon over the fish and dislodging them with a knife into juices pooling at the pan's bottom. I never did learn where they came from ("a kitchen nearby" was all that he would reveal), but they were spectacular: fresh and firm, briny and pleasingly oily.
They weren't my first anchovies of the day, nor would they be my last in the week to come. I was on a pilgrimage of sorts, inspired by an anchovy obsession, one shared by many Turks. For connoisseurs of hamsi, as anchovies are called in Turkish, the fat-padded specimens netted from the frigid Black Sea trump those taken from the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul and the Bosporus. The Black Sea season — which usually starts mid-autumn and runs through February — has been keenly anticipated for centuries. In the mid-1600s, the Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi wrote that in the port of Trabzon, on the coast's eastern half, "fishmongers at the wharf ... have special trumpets made of elder-tree wood. They only have to blow on these trumpets once and, by God's dispensation, if people praying in the mosque hear it, they will immediately leave their prayer and come running for the hamsi." Today, locals settle for feasting on the fish as often as the season will allow, often twice a day at its height, when hamsi are as cheap as 3 Turkish lira (about $1.70) per kilo.
Driven by that sort of passion, my plan was a hamsi-fueled road trip along a 300-mile stretch of Turkey's central Black Sea coast, with stops en route to sample the best of the catch, which turned out to be delicately seasonal — available one day, then not the next.
My journey kicked off on an unpromising note at the airport outside Samsun, a 90-minute flight from Istanbul, when a car rental clerk said that unseasonably warm weather was reducing the size of this year's catch. Sure enough only Marmara hamsi were to be had when I arrived in the port city of Giresun, 110 miles east. Still, at Yetimogullari Restoran (Gazi Caddesi, Findikkale Arasi; 90-454-212-0839), where chandeliers, mirrors and sleek white leather upholstery are an unlikely backdrop for wood-oven-baked breads and home-style soups and stews, baked hamsi with onions, long green chiles and tomatoes served as a good warm-up.
The next day brought leaden skies, a cold drizzle and a brisk wind from the north: unpleasant for the traveler, perhaps, but perfect for harvesting hamsi. Walking uphill from Giresun's port to the ruins of a Byzantine castle, I passed fishmongers displaying the fish in red carts, courting customers with shouts of "The anchovies have come!"
After a quick tour of Giresun's fish market, a small L-shaped collection of open stalls a block from the harbor, I headed to Emre Balikcilik (51 Fatih Caddesi; 90-454-212-7200), a fish shop and cafe where the day's catch is cooked in an open kitchen. Turken Tunan, who owns the spot with her husband, is a specialist in tava, a regional technique for preparing fish. She dipped my anchovies in corn flour, arranged them in a spiral formation in the pan and sautéed them over high heat, flipping them like an omelet midway. They were fantastically crispy, fragrant thanks to the corn flour and not at all oily. For her buglama ("Not hamsi for this, but bluefish," she noted) Ms. Tunan laid paper-thin slices of garlic and peeled and sliced tomatoes over the fish, sprinkled them with crushed dried red chile and added a shocking amount of butter. After 15 minutes on top of the stove, the tomatoes had melted onto the fish, which now swam in a luxuriously buttery tomato sauce.
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