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Has anybody travelled to Bucharest recently

post #1 of 6
10/16/11 at 9:01am
Thread Starter 

 

Bucharest having recovered from its traumatic past, having left quite a legacy of opulence and some delicious culinary secrets.

 

Spent the weekend eating and lunching at ...

 

Casa Vernescu ... serves delicious Romanesc dishes in elegant surroundings. The local cuisine is its highlight for example the fresh black sturgeon called Nisetru La Gratar.

 

Bursting with atmosphere is the restaurant called Carul cu Bere where recipes dating back to the lates 1870s are served. The beers are brewed on premises.

 

The French Thai venue called The Balthazar is the trendiest to date.

 

Casa Doina specialises in exemplary Romanian cuisine ... and the specialty here is the melted cheese called Cascaval Pane. The Papanasi, a doughnut sort of sweet is filled with spicy homemade fruit preserves.

 

It is the under discovered of all of Europe ... The hidden cafes and herbal botanical shops are fascinating.

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post #2 of 6
10/16/11 at 2:24pm

Haven't been there for 10 years or more.  It was still an Eastern European city.  In other words...  bad food, bad wines!

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post #3 of 6
10/17/11 at 10:41am
Thread Starter 

 

Eastern Europe has changed quite a bit. I am not particularly fond of Eastern European cuisines, finding them bland, dodgy and heavy on the whole, however, a dear friend of many years and her husband, who used to live in Spain, truly outdid themselves providing me with a lovely tour of the best mezze, local product selection ( good goat cheeses ) and restaurants Bucharest has to offer at the moment.

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post #4 of 6
10/17/11 at 2:48pm

I have been in other 'Eastern' European countries more recently.  I still find a lot of the cuisine heavy and stodgy.

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post #5 of 6
10/18/11 at 11:04am

A lot of post-communist food is a time warp back to the mid-sixties.  You can't blame them for trying to capture what they missed, nor can you blame them for trying to satisfy what they perceive to be the tourist desire for "national" classics.

 

If you can manage to land in an off-the-beaten-track restaurant serving simple, "country" food made from fresh ingredients -- different story altogether.  If it's Hungarian, it's probably still going to be heavy.  On the other hand, one of the best meals I ever had started with carp icre and some very fresh bread, great bread, wonderful bread; followed by sauteed veal sweetbreads with some excellent wild mushrooms (even though it was summer).  The (local) wine was surprisingly good, the coffee truly horrible.  For dessert we got bombed on something purported as slivovitz.  After the third glass or so it didn't taste so bad. 

 

Mezze, yes.  Also the cured meats were very good -- great sausage and "pastramele."  Good bakery, too.

 

Or so it was in '96.

 

My grampa Harry, a Galizianer, loved Romanian food, especially goulash.  He used to say, "The recipe for Romanian goulash starts with, 'first, you steal a chicken.'"  Even though he'd repeated the joke to me many times, the effort not to spoil the punchline was visible on his forehead. "Boychik that goulash ain't got no chicken."

 

BDL

 

 


Edited by boar_d_laze - 10/18/11 at 1:40pm
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post #6 of 6
10/18/11 at 2:47pm

The BBC have a couple of tame cooks, aka 'The Hairy Bikers' - who motorbike around the world and cook 'local' stuff.

One of their series was in Eastern Europe.  Interesting...   but not my type of 'cuisine'.....wink.gif

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