They love horses in Slovenia.Those prancing, white Lipizzaners, stars of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, are a source of national pride.
Perhaps surprising then to discover that our chevaline friends also feature so widely on the dinner tables of Ljubljana, from burger joints like Red ‘n Hot Horse to fancy restaurants such as Spajza, where horse steak is served with truffles rather than ketchup.
Of course the Slovenes are not the only people to enjoy this lean, flavoursome meat. I’ve had foal goulash in Innsbruck and thick juicy horse steak in Brussels’ much lamented Au Brabançon restaurant (which was also renowned for its choesels _ a rich and now rare offal stew served with a single lamb’s testicle floating on top!), not forgetting the saucisse d’âne made from donkeys in the French Alps. In the English-speaking world and beyond, however, eating the relatives of Trigger or Red Rum is really not the done thing.
In the Gostilna Šestica they serve young horse with blueberries and brusnicami (curd cheese pancakes). This is an 18th century inn that’s a bit out of place on the busy main street Slovenska Cesta that cuts through central Ljubljana. Although the meat was a tad dry and the service a little idiosyncratic, this was a fine place to come late on a Saturday night, when the main room fills up with waltzing couples and a gutsy songstress belts out Slovene versions of “Yesterday” and “My Way”. I’d asked to start with a plate of kraska polenta s prustom in radicem, which was not easy. It turned out to be a creamy mix of polenta, curd cheese, dried ham and radicchio and was a delight, although I was somewhat nonplussed when the waiter simultaneously set it down alongside the main course. http://www.sestica.si/.
Slovene cuisine is a happy mix of things Mediterranean, Alpine and Balkan. Expect to find pasta, dumplings and baklava cohabiting on the same menu. The delightful Gostilna Mencigar-Nobile has even more influences. It takes inspiration from the cooking of the Prekmurje region in the far east of Slovenia along the border with Hungary. The Mencigar family philosophy fits in nicely with FoodEurope’s ideals. Having made their name serving Italian food, they decided to go back to their roots in the earthy cuisine of their homeland. Their mission, boldly stated on the restaurant’s web site: “to serve traditional delicacies from Prekmurje, prepared the same way our grandmothers used to prepare them.”
Ljubljana’s first Prekmurje restaurant is a bit off the beaten track, a 15-minute walk east along the Ljubjanica River, tucked away behind Sv. Jožef’s church. From the outside, it’s modern and nondescript. Inside however, great care has been taken to give the three rooms a cool-yet-cozy feel, with soft colours, rustic ceramics and vases filled with dried flowers.
The food here is really something special. Starters include tunka, meat preserved in lard; buckwheat soup made with milk; frogs’ legs with Prekmurje ham.
Two of Prekmurje’s trademark dishes _ bograč and bujta repa are so well-liked around Slovenia that they have featured on postage stamps. Bograč is a stew of pork, beef and veal richly spiced with paprika to show off the region’s Hungarian links. Bujta repa is shredded, sour turnip traditionally prepared to accompany fresh pork on koline _ festive pig slaughtering days. The Mencigars serve it in a steaming cauldron served with home-prepared koline pork and sausages.Also featuring on those stamps is the region’s best known delicacy, Prekmurska gibanica, a fabulously intense cake made of layers of filo pastry, poppy seeds, apple, walnut and cream cheese. It’s divine and something of a national dish in Slovenia. Mencigar’s has a dessert to rival it _ ice cream made from the black-as-pitch pumpkin seed oil which Slovenes usually use to season their salads. Needless to say, the wines – from Istria rather than Prekmurja, were excellent and the staff strongly encourages consumption of slivovica both before and after the meal. http://www.mencigar-nobile.com/
Ljubljana is a perfect place for a weekend trip. It’s small enough that you don’t have to rush around or cover great distances to see it all, and instead can amble around the car-free streets of the old town on either side of the river or take the little funicular railway up to the castle. Once at the top, admire the ceiling of the gothic chapel of Sv. Jurija chapel and the view from the lookout tower, then stroll down through the crocus covered hillside. There’s a plethora of baroque churches around the city, with pride of place going to the richly decorated interior of Sv. Nikolaja’s cathedral. For fans of more modern architecture, the city’s most famous son is Jože Plečnik the secessionist master who scattered the Central Europe with his works. He’s responsible for the landmark Tromostovje bridge in the heart of the city and the National Library is considered his masterpiece. The city’s best-known secessionist building is not one of his however, Ivan Vurnik designed the shocking pink Cooperative Saving bank opposite the Grand Union Hotel and his wife Helena painted the bold façade.
Plečnik did design the two-tier market halls that run along the southern bank of the river. At street level there are little shops selling bread and cakes or cheese and sausages.
Down below by the river, there’s an elongated fish market with a varied catch from the Adriatic and Slovenia’s Alpine lakes and the fast flowing rivers. For visitors overdosing on meat, horse or not, the fish market offers a popular restaurant, the Okrepčevalnica Ribca. On the terrace under its arcades you can snack beside the water on squid, shrimp or whitebait with a glass of cool malvazija wine, or take a more substantial fish lunch.A plate of fried kalamari, with a green salad, bread and a chilled glass of white came to €9.70.
Ljubljana’s morning market spills out of Plečnik’s halls into the squares and streets around the cathedral forming a glorious confusion of colours, with piles of fresh fruit, spectacular arrangements of fresh and dried flowers and a curious and uniquely Slovenian art form _ painted bee hive panels.
On Sundays the food stalls are replaced by a flea market on the banks of the river between the Tromostovje and the Čevljarski bridges which is surprisingly hot on mementoes of the old Yugoslavia. Busts of Tito are a bargin.Two of Ljubljana’s most renowned restaurants are the aforementioned Spajza, a nicely bo-bo place in Gornji trg, one of the most atmospheric streets of the old town and the Gostilna As, which sits in a courtyard next to the central Prešernov trg. Both serve what might be called Adriatic cuisine, with dishes that blur the line between Slovene and Italian. Sea bass baked in salt may be claimed by the Ligurians as their own, but it’s also a firm favorite with the Slovenes, who use their own pure crystals from the salt pans of Piran for the purpose. Both these restaurants have it as a signature dish. As well as its fancy basement restaurant, As also has a covered terrace popular with Ljubljana’s ladies-who-lunch. It does a mean plate of Kraški reznici _ broad ribbons of pasta with karst pancetta, leaks and parsley. http://www.gostilnaas.si/.
One of the attractions of Ljubljana is its location close to both the Adriatic and the Alps. Time your visit right, and with barely an hour’s trip in either direction you can ski one day and plunge into the sea on the next.
On the edge of the Alps, heading north out of the city is the Kranjska region known for its buckwheat and sausages. In the little village of Predoslje pri Kranju is the Gostilna Krištof which would be worth a trip out from the capital even when it doesn’t have the local folk musicians waltzing visitors in on a Friday night.
The chef prefers local organic products and while the food is firmly rooted in the region’s traditions he’s not afraid to innovate which such ideas as “gorenkski suši” an appetizer with raw river trout and their bright red caviar.
The banquet which was offered on the night I was there, started with drinks on the terrace that included liquors made with odd things like pine needles, oregano or fennel.
Inside thinks got serious: smoked beef tongue with horseradish, pear and ruccola was followed by barley soup with that kranjsko klobaso sausage. The highlight was black pudding mixed with freshwater crayfish and spiced carrots. Then came lamb chops with rosemary flavoured polenta, served with black radish and sour cream, To end, chocolate dumpling with homemade strawberry ice-cream and dark chocolate cunningly spiced with some of that Piran sea salt. Each course came with matched wine, including the weird and wonderful Movia Lunar, a cloudy white made by fermenting whole bunches of grapes in underground casks, and a sweet red Pikolit, which like the vins de paille of southern France is made with grapes dried on straw mats. http://www.gostilnakristof.si/.
The whole meal was a tribute to Slovenia’s great attachment to its terroir which produces an astonishing variety of food in such a small country. Only the Illy coffee was not domestically produced, but that come pretty close _ the Yugoslavs only recognized Italian rule over Trieste in 1975, forty years after Hungarian immigrant Francesco Illy set up his company in the border town.
For places to stay, the Antiq hotel in the old town, rates highly; http://www.antiqhotel.si/; the Slon’s rooms can be a bit cramped, but it carries a faded between-the-wars panache and has two fine cafes, http://www.hotelslon.com/; the Grand Hotel Union lives up to it’s name _ if you can afford to stay in the posher, older part, http://www.gh-union.si/.
As for reading material, books set in Ljubljana are not too easy to find but you could try “Death of a Prima Donna” by Paris-based Slovene author Brina Svit, or “Veronika Decides to Die” by Brazilian best-seller Paulo Coelho. Set mostly in an unnamed Slovene industrial city “The Cartier Project” by Miha Mazzini is a wry, punky look at life in 1980’s Yugoslavia.
