WASHINGTON, D.C.
AUGUST 2, 2026
STRANGER: Burcin “Kaia” Dalkanat
LOCATION: Caruso’s Grocery, 1401 8th Street NW, Washington, D.C.
THEME: Almost a decade of DMV food reviews, strictly on her terms
More than 20,000 people are sitting at Burcin “Kaia” Dalkanat’s dinner table. Thanks to her online video series “My Food Adventures DC,” they’ve got a front row seat at Bar Chinois in Arlington, Virginia. Most of the screen is taken up by a gorgeous bowl of steaming noodles, chicken and vegetables. Chopsticks in hand, Burcin’s ready to dig in.
But something else is going on. In the background there’s a table with two older gentlemen. They’ve both pivoted their bodies so they’re staring, mouths open, down the camera lens. One of the men theatrically holds a hand up over his eyes – the way you would if dazzled by a car’s headlights. He gets up, paces over to the table (with napkin in hand for some reason), and without so much as a hello, says, “Sorry, that light is like right…” and there the video cuts off.
Burcin’s showing me the clip not to mock the man, but to explain just one of the many crash course lessons she’s learned in building up her account over the years. The man said the light Burcin was using to spruce up the video was distractingly bright from his table.
“Immediately I adjusted the light and said sorry, and I was like, wow, that’s a point I should have looked into,” she says across from me for a dinner interview.
In nine years of filming her food experiences, it’s still the only time that anyone has ever asked her to stop. And she films everything with the same goal of not intruding on other diners’ experiences, getting the shots she needs quickly and moving on. “I’m very cognizant,” she tells me. “Very kind of anal, even” about this approach.
Burcin is a welcome relief from the “come with me” food influencers that record their entire meal, lights beaming, theatrical holding of plates and overdone physical tremors of joy from the food. Her account is food and drink focused, polished and informative. Her most-shared posts are the ones that front-load information like specific dishes to try, the vibes and what to expect.
My Food Adventures DC covers eateries not just in Washington but also Maryland and Virginia. She launched it nine years ago and it’s always been self-shot, no crew. It’s primarily on Instagram but now has a TikTok companion. She’s not routinely in the videos. “It’s not about me, it’s always about the place, showing you a new place, new festival, new experience.”
We’re dining in the District tonight, at Italian spot Caruso’s Grocery. It’s a warm place, with faded mustard-color walls showing off black-and-white family photos and flowery art, comfy red leather booths and a chandelier casting a low glow over the room.
I was late, stuck in my Uber in motionless traffic on I-695. The exit to get to Caruso’s was tantalizingly close. Should I get out and risk walking it? I take a photo from the back seat and text it to Burcin, apologetic.
Then I realized I left my wallet at home. I text her again, asking if she can spot dinner and I’ll Zelle her right after.
Her reply: “You are making me pay and you are late 👀 great first impression 😉 😂 🤣”
Once I get there, she’s as much fun in person. Despite my tentative attempts to ask about My Food Adventures DC, our conversation instead careens like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride on other topics, like our mutual friend Ed. He’s Burcin’s coworker and connected us for the interview.
We both profess our love for the man, so naturally we then make fun of him. Traveling with Ed gets you a coupon-clipping, good-humored but no-nonsense dad. On a recent Disney trip, he warned everyone that if we weren’t out the hotel by 8 a.m. for early park entry, “I’m leaving without you.” Burcin has another title for him: “Karen of the group.”
I mention how I’m jealous of Ed’s globetrotting holidays – including Turkey, where Burcin was born and raised, in Ankara. “But I’m a dual citizen now, so I am American too,” she says.
“Wait, did Ankara used to be Iskenderun?”
“Oh that’s very – how do you know Iskenderun?”
“It’s in ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.’”
“Oh my god, that’s such a random fact. It’s in the southern region of Turkey. Ankara is dead in the center. And it’s a boring capital.”
She’s the only child of two doctors, mostly raised by her grandmother, who taught her to cook when Burcin was at the kitchen table doing her homework. Sometimes she’d be handed dough for hand-folded Turkish dumplings, small enough to need a child’s fingers.
Our starters arrived and Burcin pulls out her trusty light, offering to take pictures of the food, saying it’ll make them look much better. I review the images and immediately concede. And she’s careful to ensure that the light doesn’t affect the other diners sitting nearby.
Burcin’s having semolina-dusted calamari served with marinara and lemon aioli. She offers me some and it’s a pleasantly crunchy batter and not too fishy taste inside.
I’ve gone for the deep-fried mozzarella in carrozza – layers of the cheese and bread, lightly battered and served over tomato-basil sauce. Excellent but so large I’ll take half of it home.
Between bites I finally manage to check another question off my list: What brought her from Ankara to America? It was academia. Trying to figure out what she wanted to do, she ruled out engineering because she hated physics. Medicine was never on the table, her parents did that, and she wanted nothing to do with it. She was good at math. So: statistics, a bachelor’s degree in Turkey. In her junior year she did an exchange year at Boston University. “I was 18, 19, and I loved it, big city. I thought every other American city would be like Boston. But my story took me to University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.”
She went there on a Fulbright scholarship and felt the culture shock immediately. “Ankara is a big, urban city, six, seven million people. I have always been a city girl,” she says, “then my flight to Urbana-Champaign landed in the middle of a cornfield.” The two-year master’s ended in 2010; a second, in marketing research at Georgia, followed, then analytics work for a D.C. consulting firm. But Fulbright demands two years back home, so she returned to Turkey – and her long-distance relationship with a guy from Illinois didn’t survive it.
Back in Istanbul and single, she went on a first date with a man who kept checking his phone the whole time – but was gentlemanly enough to walk her home after. “I hated our first date but I thought he made up some points with that.” A second date followed, then a third. They’ve been married 11 years. “He’s six years older than me.”
They moved from Turkey back to Maryland about a decade ago. Given that My Food Adventures DC is in its ninth year, that means she started it soon after the relocation to make friends. She launched it around her birthday, having never done any social media before.
Her first post was at Sovereign, a bar-restaurant-bocce bowling alley in Georgetown. “I asked the internet what should I do to start an Instagram page and it said you have to post like nine photos at first. So I did like nine posts that first night. And then, I don’t know, it just kind of snowballed from there. And I achieved my goal, I made really good friends.”
The initial posts were all pictures until Instagram started allowing videos. “I love taking photos of my food as you can see. I like to be informational and cover what I’m eating, the vibes, the ambiance.”
The food at Caruso’s continues to impress. For our mains she’s enjoying a spicy beef and pork ragù with bucatini pasta topped with whipped ricotta. “I love spicy, Turks can handle their spice.”
I chose a special – veal parmesan in vodka sauce. Outstanding, flavorful and very moreish but still a generous portion that will necessitate a doggy bag.
Trying my best to clear the plate, I get ready to ask another question from my written list. Burcin remarks several times about the chaotic, unstructured nature of the interview – it’s much more all over the place than typical – but all the detours are thoroughly enjoyable. And there’s method to the madness, the queries always return. So, another: Why the food focus?
She started My Food Adventures DC early enough to catch what she calls the golden age of DMV food Instagram, name-checking a few accounts that were getting big around the same time, most of whom have since moved on or moved away. She never pivoted to lifestyle content, never widened the lane, even though she watched other accounts do exactly that and grow faster for it. “People tried, some people had success,” she says. “I wasn’t smart enough to see what this account could be 10 years ago. So – food it is.”
And she has a unique lane: “I’m competing with Gen Z, they’re like 20-year-olds that go to 10 places in a given week. And that’s not me. I only care about what I do, but I do want to do good for the places that host me. That responsibility still comes with the account.”
The account names her as Burcin “Kaia” Dalkanat. Burcin, she tells me, translates to “fawn” – the child of a deer – because she was born bald, with enormous eyes. Strangers have always mangled the pronunciation. “Everyone calls me Bur-sin, which I hate. I’m fine with people calling me Bur-chin, it’s what I’m used to,” she says, though the true way to say it is more complex.
Her maiden name, Evrenkaya, is shortened Kaia – easy to say – and when she started the account she decided to go by that. “When I started Instagram, I thought no-one’s going to know what Burcin is, so I started with Kaia, and that’s why it’s quotation marks.”
When she scours the DMV to find new places to try, she’s drawn to exciting menus, food she’d actually want to eat and what strikes her as a genuinely great deal. At the start she reached out to smaller places like sandwich shops, saying she was coming to cover them for free. As the account grew, PR firms started to get in touch with venues to promote. These days she has to turn down about 70% of their invites because she’s determined to keep the amount of time she spends on her food adventures with everything else going on in her life.
Burcin has also developed My Food Adventures DC to a place where now it’s never her making first contact with PR firms, restaurants or other venues to feature.
Her first viral video was showing off what to expect at a new winery, and those insider-style scoops continue to perform well. Same with videos about affordable prices. “Because the economy’s shit, man, everybody wants a good deal, rich people want a good deal too.”
With it being a sole operation, everything from filming to editing to posting is on her, but even after nine years it still invigorates. “It keeps my creative juices flowing, that storytelling aspect of it. And also the social aspect, I’m getting dates with my friends and my husband. He loves food too and the people that I take out like food too. Food is an amazing shared story, part of life. I didn’t know you before this dinner and now I feel like I know you through this pasta.”
Our last dishes together are a classic tiramisu with espresso-soaked ladyfingers, mascarpone zabaglione and Florio Marsala, and Nutella cannoli with chocolate chips and hazelnut.
They provide a decadent, fantastic end to the meal.
We ask for the check, then my last question: What’s next for her account? Every year she sets a goal for the account and for 2026 it’s reaching 25,000 followers on Instagram by the end of December. “There’s always the next milestone, 25, 30.”
She’s not quitting her nine-to-five for this, and says so without any trace of longing for the version of her life where she would. She likes her steady job and life beyond the account. “I don’t want this to feel like a job,” she says. “I want to enjoy it. I want to dictate my own terms.”
Calling My Food Adventures DC her “side quest,” she adds, “I’m just doing it for fun and I think that comes across. I take it serious enough for the people that I’m doing it for, like for the restaurants.”
I toyed with the idea of ending this writeup with a callback to the gentleman at Bar Chinois and his pantomime of shielding his delicate eyes from being dazzled by Burcin’s light. Something along the lines of he’d be right to still be doing it, except this time because of Burcin’s blinding success.
But I think it’s twee, and after more than two hours with Burcin, I know she’d roll her eyes and have a perfect quip to tell me how badly written it is. So instead, let’s do what she does and keep things polished and professional: Nine years in, she’s hit her groove with My Food Adventures DC, still a one-woman show, balanced with the rest of her life exactly how she wants it.
And not a single rhythmic nail tap of a plate to be seen.
Lovely interview, as always…and now I’m starving…
I’m hungry, now. Excellent article!!