Where do you wish to dine when night descends?

Paris, perhaps. Not an unreasonable idea, although that means subsequently returning to a hotel room smaller than a Devil's Island prison cell and the next morning awakening to a city whose residents wish you were not so annoyingly different from them.

Let me suggest Istanbul, the most engaging city I know. Turkey isn't what it once was, when the Ottoman Empire grabbed a wedge of Europe, a huge chunk of Asia, and a northerly slice of Africa. But it is undergoing a revival, reasserting itself. Name your nation—Syria, Iran, Israel, even the European Union. Turkey's leaders seem happy to tell the whole lot where to get off.

Not coincidentally, dining in Istanbul gets better all the time. It's not yet ideal. Modern culinary trends clash with Ottoman-era dishes. Islamic prohibitions against pork and bloody rare meat rankle. Yet Istanbul is proof that power and prosperity are precursors to a flourishing cuisine.

No city I know offers more wonderful settings in which to dine. From the rooftop restaurants, which are in abundance, you can look down on edifices that are undeniably heart-wrenching yet remarkably vibrant: Ottoman Empire palaces, soaring mosques, all of them illuminated first by the setting sun, then by floodlights, and finally, and most appropriately, by a crescent moon.

Or you might prefer a table situated along a cobblestone passageway in Sultanahmet, the heart of the old city. I have a preference for the restaurant Balkç Sabahattin, where alley cats beg for scraps of your grilled sea bass and white-shirted waiters chase them away with spritzes of bottled water, inflicting momentary terror. (The cats recover swiftly and return.)

I also appreciate a well-set outdoor table only a few feet from the banks of the Bosporus, a strait more impressive than Paris's moody Seine. At Feriye Lokantas you might see small dolphins on a pleasure trip from the Black Sea leap into the air for their own amusement as well as yours. (A confession: I've never observed this, but the woman seated across from me swore she did, and our waiter said that on warm nights, after work, he sometimes went for a dip with them.)

You've heard the expression "location, location, location." Istanbul has it like no other city. Geographically, it is partly in Europe and partly in Asia, a beneficial accident that Turkey leverages to the maximum. Over the course of centuries, everything flowed into Istanbul, especially food. But it has always been the water and the nearness of it that elevates and distinguishes the city.