Weddings Performed at the Restaurant

Although private meetings and dinners are held in the upstairs halls, one of 7 Mehmet Restaurant’s unwritten rules is that wedding dinners are not served in the restaurant. Believing in the operational challenges of allowing celebration meals in a restaurant that hosts guests every day from both Antalya and around the world, Mehmet shares an incident that became one of the restaurant’s remarkable stories:

“Some of our guests are business people who hold dinner meetings here. We don’t allow chaos to break out. In short, I can say that we take great care to ensure that one guest does not disturb another inside the restaurant.

Also, some of our guests just want a quality meal, that’s all. A guest comes, focuses on their table, their guests, and their food. They don’t want anything else to distract them. We don’t hold weddings, but many people want to have a meal here with their family and friends after their wedding ceremony. –Mehmet starts laughing here.– One day, I noticed the mayor of the time walk in wearing his robe. I asked, ‘Mayor, what brings you here?’ He said, ‘Mehmet, there’s a wedding here.’ Meanwhile, we had no knowledge of this. He walked to a table where four people were dining, opened the register, performed the wedding, and then left. If I had turned the mayor away, it would have been a problem. If I had told our guest ‘no, it’s not allowed,’ that would have been a problem too. The man performed his wedding at 7 Mehmet Restaurant like a dignitary, had his meal, and handled everything without disturbing anyone. After that, others who saw or heard about this tried to do the same at gatherings a few times… Some even managed to perform their weddings at 7 Mehmet without the official’s robe so that we wouldn’t notice.”

Mehmet, laughing, adds another reason for not wanting weddings in the restaurant: “My concern is this: of course, it’s wonderful that people form a connection with 7 Mehmet Restaurant. We are happy to serve their first meals, proposals, and wedding dinners. But I worry that if these people eventually go their separate ways, they might remember 7 Mehmet Restaurant as a bad memory and nobody will want to visit. –Mehmet laughs again.– I have to act this way to prevent that.”