The night before the leaders arrived, Türkiye answered the summit with a dinner.
While the delegations in Ankara sorted through drafts of a communiqué and the reporters chased the F-35 question, the Communications Directorate did something quieter. It seated foreign correspondents at a table and let the food do the talking. The program had a title, "Türkiye's Gastrodiplomacy Model: The Heritage Table," and a host, Communications Director Burhanettin Duran, who spoke to the room in English.
"Sometimes, a shared meal on a table can say what pages of documents cannot," Duran said, according to Anadolu Agency's account of the evening. Coming the weekend before a summit that ran on pages of documents, the line was doing some work.
Duran's pitch was that cuisine is one of the "most direct, most sincere, and most enduring expressions of soft power," AA reported. And he was careful to place Türkiye in company. Thailand, South Korea, Peru, Italy: countries that have spent years turning their kitchens into an arm of the national brand. Thailand has run a state program to seed Thai restaurants abroad since the early 2000s. So the idea Duran described is neither new nor Turkish in origin. What he claimed was that Türkiye has finally decided to compete on that field on purpose.
Then he described the table itself, and this is where the argument got specific.
The Turkish table, in his telling, is "a circle where everyone sits at an equal distance, free from hierarchy." He reached for two old phrases to make the point. One was the "bond of shared bread and salt," the Turkish idea of tuz-ekmek hakkı, the obligation you owe someone once you have eaten with them. The other was a rule of hospitality: you never ask a guest whether they are hungry. You seat them, and you feed them, and the question never comes up. As diplomatic metaphors go, an equal circle with no head of the table is a pointed one to offer a room of NATO correspondents.
Here is the part that doesn't rest on anyone's speech.
Three Turkish cities sit in UNESCO's Creative Cities Network for gastronomy, and they got there one at a time. Gaziantep joined in 2015, the first Turkish city on the list, on the strength of a pistachio-and-pepper kitchen that treats baklava as a serious craft. Hatay followed in 2017, the old Antioch, where the cooking carries Arab, Armenian, and Mediterranean lines in the same market. Afyonkarahisar came in 2019, known for its clotted cream and a sucuk that the town stakes its name on. Three cities, three separate applications, three different reasons.
The coffee has its own paperwork. UNESCO inscribed "Turkish coffee culture and tradition" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, the ritual as much as the drink: the unfiltered grounds, the cup read for fortunes afterward, the fact that the word for breakfast, kahvaltı, literally means "before coffee." Duran folded a proverb into this part. "A cup of coffee is remembered for 40 years," he said, which is a compression of the Turkish line that a single cup buys 40 years of goodwill.
And the baklava is, in a bureaucratic sense, first. Antep Baklava became the first Turkish product to win a European Union geographical indication when it was registered in 2013, the same protected-name status that fences off Champagne or Parma ham. A tray of it now carries a legal fact along with the pistachios.
The heritage has a policy wrapper too, though here the ground gets softer. Duran credited First Lady Emine Erdoğan's patronage and pointed to a Turkish Cuisine Week that, per AA, has been marked since 2022. He cited a book prepared with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which AA said records 218 recipes in their original form. Both of those specifics come from AA's report rather than from anything I could check against the ministry, so take the year and the count as the agency's, not as confirmed. The framing around them kept coming back to waste: healthy eating, sustainability, zero waste, protecting local production before it disappears.
So how did the guests find it? Warmly, by AA's telling, which is the only telling there is. The agency quoted an American journalist, Iris Tao, on her first visit, calling the food "very tasty" and saying Duran's point about a shared meal outweighing documents stuck with her. A Danish reporter, Peter Ernstved Rasmussen, described Türkiye as "the bridge to the east" and said the summit's real job was for Washington to reaffirm its commitment to the alliance. A Ukrainian journalist, Daniel Tkiie, liked the "sharing bread" message and hoped the summit would show "strong unity" behind Kyiv. Those last two answers drift from the food toward the reason everyone was in Ankara, which is worth noticing rather than smoothing over. AA is reporting praise, so read it as praise reported by the host's own wire.
What the dinner was really testing is whether a state can be understood through its table faster than through its statements. The summit's business went into a declaration that most people will never read. The kitchen made a plainer case, and it had receipts: a coffee ritual on a UNESCO list, three cities in a global network, a tray of baklava with a European trademark. Duran's wager is that people forget communiqués and remember meals. On the evidence of how long a cup of coffee is supposed to last, he might be right.