It's always a trick finding a dependable late-night bite on the road in Eastern Europe, and especially so in a country with a notoriously fatty cuisine. Unfortunately, that definition includes pretty much any town in any country east of the German-Polish border, stretching all the way up through the Baltic and out to and through Siberia. And let's not kid ourselves, it also embraces large swaths of Germany and Austria themselves.
There is one idea in these thousands of kitchens, and that idea is: to fill you until you are as fat as a tick. Partly it is the climate, but it's also partly the 20th century's legacy of war and revolution. Filling you up as if it is the last meal before the Bolsheviks -- or, depending on where you are, the Wehrmacht -- arrives is a hard idea for Eastern Europeans to lose. It'll take a few more generations for that to wear off.
It's time to face the facts: in any country with a national dumpling, especially a former Communist country, your late-night dining quest will not be easy. The drinks culture in what we'll call the Wild East is slowly becoming more sophisticated, but that's a different story. You can find trained or semi-trained bartenders in Bratislava, Ljubljana, Bucharest, Belgrade, Talinn, Riga, and points east. Good chefs are thinner on the ground.
It's arguable that drinks culture, though precise, is much more easily revolutionized or renovated than the thinking of the man or woman behind the stove in a given Eastern European kitchen. Why? Accessibility of ingredients. Liquor is just easier to get from its major distributors than, say, delectable perishables such as cilantro or peaches.
Secondly, in the Wild East the ordinary Western dining math is reversed -- you can't, necessarily, depend upon the best-looking or most popular places. In fact, sometimes you should run from them. And there's a second, confusing element to the culinary re-joining of Eastern Europe to the world. Every chef has discovered the Wolfgang Puck-Spago pizza of the ragin' 1980s, when Jack Nicholson ruled the world. Which is to say, they've figured out in Bratislava and Zagreb and Sarajevo how to get some arugula coming in, and somebody trucked up some actual ham from Parma, and some other dude built some wood-burning pizza ovens.
But I can only eat so much pizza.
This was driven home to me on a job in Budapest recently. Work for my five-day stay usually ended around ten p.m. On the Pest side of the river, in the roiling, restaurant- and cafe-filled streets on either side of Andrassy, approximately at the level of Ferenc Liszt Street, it was a sea of pizzarias of various levels of aspiration, and "authentic Hungarian" cuisine. Both deadly choices after ten at night.
I'd caught wind of an Israeli place and was hoping for some fresh vegetables, but en route I wandered down a little side street just a block south of the main hubub on Liszt and stumbled across a corner spot called Ket Szerecsen, the Two Saracens. (Budapest was occupied by the Turks for a few hundred years, hence the irono-name.)
Ket Szerecsen, founded in 1998, has honed a new and a nouveau local cuisine out of the Hungarian kitchen. There are fish, meat, and vegetable tapas dishes -- an anomaly in the East. On special the night I was there were beef fajitas. All pastas handmade. I dove in. I got the eggplant tapas spread, a creamy delight with pita, a salad, and a small secondi-sized portion of tagliatelle with a simple, spicy tomato sauce. All I needed and not too much. The wine list was extraordinary -- Hungarian whites are quite dry and elegant and the viniculture has taken a great leap forward over the last quarter-century.
But it was the look of the Two Saracens that taught me the lesson: it had survived, and even thrived, among what I will call the vast ocean of badly-laid-on tourist joints in the neighborhood by becoming a place that Budapesters would go to eat. It looked like somebody's living room writ large. Normal -- not shrill -- people on a night out were at table. You could spend real money if you wanted, here, but that wasn't the point. The point was to nourish, frankly, the body and the soul. It was comforting, and though vastly foreign, had a great, domestic, feel. You felt you might like to have a drink with the chef on his night off. If you lived here, they'd be your friends.
Which, in turn, taught me how to think about finding the right place in the maze of bad dining choices that is Eastern Europe. I will be in many of these towns in the coming months and I think the lesson is: you have to be willing to sift and drift. Ask yourself, if I were one of the three smart people in this town, what would I be going for right now? In short, the Two Saracens, or their culinary equivalents are the template. The answer sounds simple, but actually, it's quite complex: look for some place that feels like home.
