Lyulin Stamenov/Sofia Echo
IS there any Eastern European cuisine that doesn’t worship the cabbage god?
In Bulgaria the cooks go crazy with this homely vegetable, shoving it on everything from salads and sandwiches to slices of pizza. At Bohemia Club – a Czech restaurant – we were administered the most dangerous cabbage overdose of our lives, in the form of a giant, dry, grassy salad stuffed with you-know-what and ringed with beets. We now know what it’s like to inhale a tumbleweed.
For us, this is just more proof that the cuisine in this part of the world is hopelessly incestuous. Each country has done a little too much recipe and ingredient-swapping with its neighbours over the years, so that by now everyone’s ‘national specialities’ taste like everyone else’s.
At Bohemia Club, too many of the choices seem to be mere twists on the food we’ve come to know as Bulgarian. And it doesn’t help that there’s no English menu here. With our decent grasp of the Bulgarian language we were able to spot at least a couple of novel-seeming dishes, but perhaps other expats won’t be so lucky.
After the cabbage fiasco, we were happy to get our appetiser of feta cheese with garlic and walnut sauce. Although we are SO over this Bulgarian white cheese by now, the sauce made this dish the highlight of our night. We bickered over sharing the stuff as we downed forkfuls of it with some of the spiced potato wedges. These are no different from those bags of seasoned French fries you find in supermarket freezers, but sometimes simple hits the spot.
The plate of Swiss cheese we also ordered was presented nicely with two thin orange slices and made a good partner for our two chicken entrees. The first was just chicken rubbed with pepper, the pieces fried lightly to a semi-scary pinkness. The chicken rolls, however, came as two cylinders filled with mushrooms and yellow cheese and sitting in a light gravy – a good knockoff of chicken cordon bleu.
Bohemia Club has the prices, service and atmosphere of an unpretentious cafe. The waitress brought us the bill in a glass not longer after we ordered, and we got a kick out of the dumbwaiter that is used to convey dishes to the downstairs dining area. It’s a charming Old World touch, as is the collection of beer steins over the bar. We realised too late that we should have checked out what kinds of Czech beer they had.
They wouldn’t dare put cabbage in that, would they?
In Bulgaria the cooks go crazy with this homely vegetable, shoving it on everything from salads and sandwiches to slices of pizza. At Bohemia Club – a Czech restaurant – we were administered the most dangerous cabbage overdose of our lives, in the form of a giant, dry, grassy salad stuffed with you-know-what and ringed with beets. We now know what it’s like to inhale a tumbleweed.
For us, this is just more proof that the cuisine in this part of the world is hopelessly incestuous. Each country has done a little too much recipe and ingredient-swapping with its neighbours over the years, so that by now everyone’s ‘national specialities’ taste like everyone else’s.
At Bohemia Club, too many of the choices seem to be mere twists on the food we’ve come to know as Bulgarian. And it doesn’t help that there’s no English menu here. With our decent grasp of the Bulgarian language we were able to spot at least a couple of novel-seeming dishes, but perhaps other expats won’t be so lucky.
After the cabbage fiasco, we were happy to get our appetiser of feta cheese with garlic and walnut sauce. Although we are SO over this Bulgarian white cheese by now, the sauce made this dish the highlight of our night. We bickered over sharing the stuff as we downed forkfuls of it with some of the spiced potato wedges. These are no different from those bags of seasoned French fries you find in supermarket freezers, but sometimes simple hits the spot.
The plate of Swiss cheese we also ordered was presented nicely with two thin orange slices and made a good partner for our two chicken entrees. The first was just chicken rubbed with pepper, the pieces fried lightly to a semi-scary pinkness. The chicken rolls, however, came as two cylinders filled with mushrooms and yellow cheese and sitting in a light gravy – a good knockoff of chicken cordon bleu.
Bohemia Club has the prices, service and atmosphere of an unpretentious cafe. The waitress brought us the bill in a glass not longer after we ordered, and we got a kick out of the dumbwaiter that is used to convey dishes to the downstairs dining area. It’s a charming Old World touch, as is the collection of beer steins over the bar. We realised too late that we should have checked out what kinds of Czech beer they had.
They wouldn’t dare put cabbage in that, would they?
