EATING CROATION
15 to 27 June 2018
My wife,
Von-Mari, and I spent 14 days in Croatia, from middle to end June, on a second
honeymoon to celebrate 10 years of marriage. One of the culinary goals was a
slightly delayed anniversary dinner at a one-star Michelin restaurant in
Dubrovnik but, other than that, our aim was the more general one of eating as
well as possible in a country whose culinary traditions were unknown to us,
apart from reading of a mixture of Italian and Mediterranean influences. We had
some interesting and mostly excellent food but to this day I cannot say we
truly ate anything that was specifically, traditionally and uniquely Croatian. Pizza and pasta seem to be big there and on
the coast there is plentiful seafood, but none of this was significantly
different to similar food we’d eaten in, for example, Italy or Spain. Not that
we went out of our way to find restaurants that supposedly served authentic Croatian
dishes but, unlike Spain with its tapas or Greece and Turkey with their mezze,
even the tourist trap restaurants in Dubrovnik Old Town did not offer anything
as distinctive.
The whole
conundrum was typified for me by a restaurant that offered, of all things,
authentic Bosnian cuisine in Dubrovnik Old Town, yet called Taj Mahal.
The highlights
were two superb dinners in Dubrovnik and Zagreb respectively. The lowlight was
possibly the worst and most expensive pasta dishes we’ve ever had, in a small
coastal town called Mali Ston. Zagreb was reasonably priced and in Dubrovnik
Old Town we encountered restaurant prices that almost made Bruges, previously
the most expensive dining experiences we’d had in Europe, seem like a discount
food town.
We ate well,
perhaps too well at times, with a few exceptions, at a variety of
establishments, a mostly reasonable prices and I concluded, apropos the Michelin
star dinner, that the discerning diner
in the Western Cape can eat as well in and around Cape Town as one can eat at the best Europe has to offer.
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