This paper explores the contested nature of the tavern as a blurred space between public and private space in Ottoman Istanbul in the 17th century. The focus of this research is Galata, the city’s cosmopolitan district and the home to the great majority of its taverns. I argue that the taverns, indispensable social agencies serving as meeting places, were integral to everyday life, both for locals and visitors. Not only did they provide livelihoods for keepers and servants, but the taverns contributed to social encounters between people from all walks of life. The social interactions were facilitated by the public consumption (alcoholic drinks, predominantly wine and arak, and food) and entertainment (music and dance) practices, which were the symbols of the multifunctionality and centrality of Ottoman taverns to urban life, like their European counterparts, as opposed to the general wisdom which does not usually associate taverns with the Islamic world. As a part of their social features, I argue that the taverns were spatially ambiguous or "contested spaces" since they simultaneously housed their keepers and hosted their patrons or members of the public. Existing on the boundaries between public and private domain, the taverns help us to better understand the tension between public and private space—one of the fundamental topics of the studies on the early modern Ottoman Empire and the larger early modern world. This tension resulted in disputes among the neighbors on the one hand; promoted sociability and fortified social networks on the other hand—incredibly well documented in the city’s Islamic court records, the main body of primary sources of this paper. This is not a contradictory picture, but a portrayal of the complex interplay between the taverns and the social life in Ottoman Istanbul.