This paper traces the culinary adventures of an ambassador, his entourage, and his rivals, in mid-sixteenth-century Constantinople. It opens with a brief outline of the comings and goings of French and German diplomats between 1544 and 1549. This will provide the context for three narratives by different observers of what must have been strikingly similar occasions, a series of dinners at which diplomats on arrival or departure were entertained by the Sultan’s ministers. Details of food and drink at these occasions are then examined and questioned with the help of reports by contemporaries who, whether they travelled as diplomats or scholars or neither, were ready to explore the ethnography and archaeology of Ottoman lands.