One fruit, pressed green, and a scent that fills the room before the first sip.
Salmakis is the juice of the Bodrum mandarin, a small, seeded citrus that grows on one peninsula on Türkiye’s Aegean coast and nowhere else. Picked while the peel is still green, it is sharper than lime and smells like orange blossom and sea air at once.
We cold-press it and add nothing. In Bodrum it is what goes in the glass at beach clubs and sunset bars. Now it travels.
Start with the fruitToo sharp to sip alone. That is the point.
Picked green, the juice does the work of fresh lime and a citrus liqueur at once: acidity that wakes up the spirit, and an aroma that stays on the glass long after. Bartenders in Bodrum have used it in place of imported lime for years.
House recipes
Squeezed in Bodrum. Bottled in Miami.
Heat would strip the aromatics that make this fruit what it is. So the juice is never pasteurized: it is frozen the moment it is pressed, shipped cold, and made safe with high-pressure processing. No water, no sugar, no concentrate, no preservatives, no flavorings.
Green outside. Orange inside. Fragrant throughout.
Small, thin-skinned and full of seeds, the Bodrum mandarin is an old, unselected variety. It bruises, puffs and over-ripens quickly, holds poorly in storage and does not travel. That is why you have never seen one in an American grocery store, and why we built Salmakis around juice rather than fruit.
Bodrum Mandarin holds a registered Designation of Origin from the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (protected since 3 December 2009).
Picked by hand, one fruit at a time
There is no machine for this. Fruit is cut with shears and carried out in baskets from small, family-held groves tucked between stone walls and village houses. The green harvest runs October to November at 40–50 grams a fruit; the ripe harvest runs mid-December to late February.
Kokulu mandalina
In Bodrum it is simply called the fragrant mandarin. The thin peel is dense with essential oil; cut one fruit and the whole room knows. The juice carries that nose with it.
Peel oils on the rim are half the experience.
Which is why Salmakis is pressed whole, and why we ask bartenders to garnish with a wheel of green mandarin wherever they can find one.
BODRUM sits on the tip of a peninsula reaching into the Aegean. Within living memory it was a quiet town of fishermen and sponge divers; today it is one of the world’s most sought-after summer destinations, with beach clubs, boutique hotels and Yalıkavak, a marina repeatedly named the world’s best for superyachts. The orchards are still there. Its orchards grow in a true microclimate: hot, dry summers, mild winters, limestone soil rich in minerals, and a steady sea breeze the locals call the Zefiriye wind. The same tree, grown anywhere else, does not give the same color, taste or aroma.
Türkbükü · Gümüşlük · Yalıkavak · Müsgebi · Bitez · Turgutreis · Gündoğan · Bardakçı, and the villages around them.
Just as Bodrum intended.
Generations ago, a merchant from the Greek island of Kalymnos settled his debts with a friend in Bodrum not with money, but with citrus saplings, a simple expression of the quiet trust between the two shores of the Aegean.
Carried across the sea, the saplings took root on the Bodrum Peninsula. Shaped by its sun, wind, and soil, they became the Bodrum mandarin: full of seeds, intensely fragrant, and increasingly rare. (Today, only around 240,000 trees remain.)
Salmakis captures this mandarin at the moment its character is strongest. We harvest it while still green, when its aroma is most intense and its acidity sharpest.
We cold-press it and add nothing else. Just as Bodrum intended.
Salmakis was founded by Volkan Okay Yazici. He grew up in a house in Bardakçı Bay, in Bodrum, the bay of the ancient Salmakis spring.
In Bodrum, every family has a mandarin tree and its own way of using the fruit. Every winter, his family’s house smelled of it.
Volkan has lived in Miami for 26 years. He never found that taste here.
Miami and Bodrum have a lot in common: the sea, the long afternoons, the late nights. Salmakis brings a recipe passed down through generations to the city he now calls home.
Salmakis was the spring of ancient Halicarnassus, today’s Bodrum, a spring of classical myth that rises in Bardakçı Bay, beside the old harbor. We took the name because the juice is exactly that: a single source, a single place, carried to you without alteration.
To bring the Bodrum mandarin from a rare local treasure to the world’s finest bars, kitchens and shelves, while protecting the trees, the growers and the heritage that make it possible.
Wherever the afternoon runs long.
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Pour it at your bar, kitchen or shelf.
Bars, restaurants, hotels, distributors and retailers in the United States: write to us and we’ll be in touch.
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