Romania

[magnolia]

Looking for suggestions, advice, do's and don'ts...am going at the end of January.

[robert brown]

The best squabs I ever had were from Transylvania. Unfortunately I didn't eat them there.

[Bux]

Are you sure they were squabs? ;)

[robert brown]

Bux, I had them at my "discovery of the year 2001" restaurant, Miramonte L'Altro" outside of Brescia. They came from a breeder in Translyvania, so the waiter told me. But isn't Transylvania part of Hungary as well, now that I think of it?

[Guest James Prince]

I visited friends in Bucharest and Brasov in 1998, and I'm sure much has changed since then. I remember two meals in particular:

In Bucharest, we had dinner at "Club Dracula" (Splaiul Independentei 8A). Done up like the Count's castle, it features a series of rooms on the theme, including a dungeon with human skeletons, torture devices, coffins, dark carved wood and hunting trophies everywhere. All the cocktails were laced with -- you guessed it -- raspberry puree. The Transylvanian food was surprisingly good. As a starter my host and I shared a Romanian charcuterie platter (which included blood, heart and lung sausages) and for an entree I had sarmale (cabbage leaves stuffed with rice, meat and herbs -- creamier and more savory than the sweet-sour Jewish kind) with mamaliga (polenta, a ubiquitous Romanian dish). Hokey but good fun.

I also had an excellent dinner in Poiana Brasov, a charming ski resort set at 1000 meters about 12km SW of the city of Brasov. We dined at Vanatorul ("Hunter"), a game restaurant in a chalet-like building located not far from the lake, on the left side of the road up to the Kanzel ski lift. We started with mamaliga (this time with sheep's cheese and spek) and then had a mixed game grill of bear, venison and wild boar, carved and then flamed tableside with tuica (Romanian brandy). It was quite hearty but delicious.

Hope this is helpful.

James

New York, NY

[magnolia]

I am just back, and I wish I had something really encouraging and interesting to say about the food I had in Romania.

However, all I can say is that there was more than enough of it, for which I should be thankful, and that it was served with great generosity and hospitality.

However, there was not much variety, no matter whether at a restaurant or private home, everything was pretty much the same.

Lunch and dinner always started with a plate of coldcuts of pork and variations on pork, and some feta-like cheese that was good if a bit salty, and some kind of pickled cabbage salad and once or twice we had a soup, clear broth with some kind of egg-based items floating in it - sort of like spaetzle (sp?) but softer.  Next course was grilled meats and sausage, also mainly pork, but once we had rabbit and another time some chicken. Dessert was a large doughnut with jam and cream. A few times we had mamaliga, which I actually like - it's baked polenta.  But after having the above four or five times, I found myself wondering if this is how Romanians themselves eat all the time, or whether this was them putting on the Ritz for me? The amount and the portions for very generous and the hosts could not have been nicer but I honestly did not go to one place that I could recommend as a must-not-miss...Even at restaurants that had multi-page menus, all the dishes that arrived really looked and tasted very similar...

[Jinmyo]

A Romanian friend who left in the early 1980s told me that back then when you went to the shop to buy a pound of meat, you got a pound of meat. It might be chicken, pork, beef, horse and from any part of the animal. When you bought a knife you got a knife. For boning, carving, slicing bread whatever. She was amazed that there were so many different kinds of knives in Israel.

[Peter B Wolf]

This reminds me when I was in Romania in 1991, right after the Communist collaps. Going into one of their Department Store, no "s" they only had one, I was looking around on the first floor, and not seeing what I wanted, I asked " don't you have shirts here?" and the clerk said "No, here we have no pants, they have no shirts on the second floor"

[magnolia]

and yes, they have no bananas too

[anil]

I'm glad you made a really positive effort to describe your experience. Coincidentally,

yesterday, I was sitting in the bar of the ITC Lounge in Mumbai Airport talking to two romanian

guys about their food experience in .IN, and also inquired about food in Bucharest. In their opinion, the eating culture in the country in an amalgam of influences from neighbouring countries and transposed by decades of poverty and strict communist rule under Cheauscau (sp?)

[magnolia]

That makes sense, because they seemed so eager to display quantities of meat, which must be a sign of prosperity, and many course of food one after the other.

The only retail shop I had a chance to visit was a petrol station (like a mobil shop or a Shell shop) and it looked just like a petrol station anywhere in Europe, with lots of sweets, cookies, sodas, snack & junk food. So my experience is not very profound or a scientific survey, I just thought it was interesting.

I found the lyrics to an old Yiddish song called "Rumania, Rumania" which makes reference to all the good foods they had in the 'old days', and implies that Romania invented Pastrami and other foods of which I saw no evidence in restaurants.

What did the Romanian people you met think of Indian food? I don't think there are any Indian restaurants in Romania (though I'm sure there will be soon...I even had Indian food in Vietnam!)

[Fat Guy]

From my review of Sammy's:

"I'm about to sing a song called 'Roumania, Roumania!'," begins the Sammy's pianist/singer/comedian. "This song has been performed by some of the greatest Jewish singers of recent memory. But of all the versions of 'Roumania Roumania,' that have been performed by all these talented musicians, it has been said that my rendition is . . . one of them."

[magnolia]

From my review of Sammy's:

"I'm about to sing a song called 'Roumania, Roumania!'," begins the Sammy's pianist/singer/comedian. "This song has been performed by some of the greatest Jewish singers of recent memory. But of all the versions of 'Roumania Roumania,' that have been performed by all these talented musicians, it has been said that my rendition is . . . one of them."

Ba dum bum...

Well, I have the lyrics - in Yiddish no less - if you want 'em.

Good to know it's still being performed, and that Sammy's is still around. My family used to call Sammy's "Heart attack on a plate".

[John Whiting]

This abandoned thread concerning Romania has reminded me of the memoir I’ve been meaning to write for almost thirty years. Finally, this is it. Thank you, Steven, for the title.

ROMANIA, ROMANIA

Years of living (if you can call it living) under Ceausescu schooled the Romanians in the finer points of paranoia. When I was touring the Warsaw Pact countries in the 70s and 80s, Romania was the only country in which I felt everywhere an ominous presence, a funeral pall which hung over not only the bleakly monumental city of Bucharest, but also the primitive countryside through which we were driven by bus to concerts in Tirgu Mures and Sibiu. Peasant farmhouses along the road, elaborately festooned and brightly painted - as alluring as the witch’s gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel - had broken windows patched with whatever materials were to hand. We stopped briefly at the birthplace of Vlad Dracul in Sighisoara, deep in the Transylvanian forests; it was a comfortable bourgeois house whose modest well-proportioned rooms were almost reassuring. Not a bad sort, that Dracula. A bit of a thirst, perhaps . . .

I awoke in Sibiu on a Sunday morning to find the ancient town under a soft blanket of new snow. Everyone was bundled in their winter furs and on the way to church. I quickly got dressed and followed them. I found the huge onion-topped church full both of worshippers and the echoing magnificence of a Bach choral prelude. The German music, service and sermon were a reverberating remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Our last evening in Bucharest we were entertained by Miriam Marbe, a much-honored Romanian composer in her early fifties whose international reputation had helped her to hang onto the comfortable if threadbare family home. I chatted for much of the evening with her precocious and ravishingly beautiful fourteen-year-old daughter. It would be difficult for her to go to university, she told me – although tuition was free, the price of admission was in fact the gift of a new car to a government official.

The dining table was spread with a feast of salads, cold meats and pastries which must have dented the food allowances of every one of the twenty or so artists who had banded together to entertain us. The wine – deep, well-aged, almost black – was nectar. How much would still be left after we departed? And what would they eat for the rest of the month?

A reminder of how desperately these people lived came at the end of the evening, when I discovered that my leather gloves were missing. I commented innocently that I must have dropped them somewhere in the bedroom where we left our coats, whereupon a search ensued which I gradually realized was only a face-saving ritual. Years later I told this story to another Romanian composer with whom I was working in Stuttgart. As I was leaving at the end of our week together he stopped me in the driveway and handed me a package. “We owe you this,” he said. It contained a pair of fine leather gloves.

A couple of years later I was having coffee with Miriam in a café on the Champs Elysées. Suddenly she leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “That man,” she whispered, “the one with the fedora, sitting at the bar. He is a member of the Romanian secret police.” Such paranoia! I had to laugh. She sat back and muttered something in Romanian, whereupon the man quickly turned around and stared at her. When we had finished our coffee and gone outside I asked her what she had said to attract his attention. She shrugged. “I only remarked,” she said, “that at least his socks were Romanian.”

Miriam died last year – I learned that someone had composed an orchestral piece in her memory. At least she lived long enough to enjoy her country’s long-delayed liberation. Her beautiful daughter must have wangled an education somehow, for she is now a journalist in Holland. She won’t have any trouble getting interviews.

[yvonne johnson]

I enjoyed that. Thanks.

The thread has temporarily disappeared, but I ordered Paul Richardson’s "Cornucopia: A gastronomic tour of Britain" after your mentioning it and I find Richardson's writing to be very good. I never thought a description of the Kent apple would make me teary-eyed. That poor tree, heavy with lovely fruit and the cruel rejection of its produce by the supermarkets because of the apples' irregular shapes and rough skin.

[John Whiting]

Thank you. I'm really glad you've enjoyed _Cornucopia_. Paul's friend Colin Spencer, who appears in the opening acknowledgements and also under a pseudonym (pp.17-20), is bringing out his history of British Food in October, published by Grub Street. He's a great food historian (Germaine Greer has expansively called him the greatest living food writer) and this will be his magnum opus.

[jordyn]

I just got back from five days in Bucharest. Like magnolia, I really wanted to like the food there, but had a tough time. Most of the food is very consistent in its heavy emphasis on fatty meats and bland starches, with very little to interest the pallate.

First, a few general notes:

1) Service at Romanian restaurants is not good. It's generally extremely slow, and servers seemed loathe to even try to accomodate any slightly unusual requests. Here's an example of a conversation in a Romanian restaurant: "Can we slide these two tables together so that all six of us can sit together?" "No." "Well, it looks like we probably could by moving these chairs out of the way." "No. These are separate tables." Such conversations generally did not end up going in a productive direction.

2) Romanian wine is not good. I heard from a lot of Romanians that their wine was great, but I did not have a single glass of Romanian wine that I found drinkable, much less good. I don't drink beer, but people who drink both wine and beer seemed to think the beer was fine but the wine was not.

3) Vegetables generally were good. Things like salads and other dishes that emphasized the vegetable's natural flavor (as opposed to stuffed cabbage) were generally quite tasty. A Romanian told me that they were famous for their good vegetables, but this came shortly after a comment about their great wine, so I mostly discounted it.

I ate several meals at Cuploa, in the Marriott. This was a totally typical chain hotel restaurant, expensive by Romanian standards, although fairly cheap compared to most U.S. hotel restaurants.

Slightly better was Cascina, also in the Marriott. I only ate one meal here, but it seemed to be quite good. Service here was the slowest we experienced in Romania, though, which represents a special feat. More than half of our party ended up leaving long before orders were taken; those of us that did eat only got food because we took food from the antipasto bar.

I also visited the Count Dracula Club, mentioned by James Prince, and was disappointed. The theme rooms resembled what you'd get at an American Halloween party more than anything authentically scary, the food was adequate but the typical Romanian fare, and service was slow even by Romanian standards.

Two places I have positive things to say about are Aquarium, a very nice Italian restaurant with good if uncreative Italian food. Prices here were very high by Romanian standards, with entrees pushing their way into the $10-$20 range, but this was by far the best food I had in Romania. Service was generally quite good, and they had Italian wines (see my comments on Romanian wine above for why this was such a high note).

Finally, Casa Doina was also quite nice. We were served Romanian food with a slightly greek feel, which was not exceptional, but certainly provided a more interesting range of flavors than most of the food in Romania. The restaurant is in a very pleasant outdoor space.

[John Whiting]

I was in Roumania in the Ceausescu days. The only meal I ate in public which gave me any pleasure was at a huge old beer hall, the sort one finds in Munich, where we ate very Germanic "wieners und sauerkraut" fare. It was the only place which had any sense of reality or of continuity; others, no matter how old, felt somehow as though they'd just been knocked together for the night and would be gone in the morning. Life itself under Ceausescu had this sort of impermanence.

[Mistinguett]

It's an old subject, but I figured my 2 cents might be useful somehow, who knows?

I lived in Romania quite a few years, and last year I spent almost 5 months in Bucharest, and I found myself going back over and over again at the same restaurant, called "La mama" ("Mother's")- the only one serving more than the usual grilled fare. Extraordinary white bean soup with smoked ribs; "bulz" - layers of polenta with ham and feta cheese, topped with an egg sunnyside up; pretty good steak (ok, it's grilled meat ); huge sundaes and my fave, fresh raspberries topped with whipped cream. As far as I remember, nothing on the menu more expensive than $2.

Other than that, grilled meats everywhere, as it was said before. Many bad restaurants. A few good ones - if you like meat, indeed.

The basic restaurant fare (and that includes the romanian restaurants in NY) is a couple of soups - sweet or sour (which is an aquired taste, but I find it delicious once aquired) including a tripe soup that can be a treat if made well (the best of it it's in NY, btw), mezzes like a diced vegetable salad held together by a bit of mayo and mustard), bean or eggplant puree , and for main course grilled meats with green lettuce and tomatoes, a stew ("tochitura") made with thin sausages and diced meat that comes with polenta, and sometimes, cabbage rolls (really good). Oh, and I shouldn't forget the amazing "mici" - small sausage-like but without the casing (like a turkish kofta but much more savory), that's best dipped in a bit of mustard. There's a cute story behind the creation of the "mici", and it does not include turks.

For sweets, crepes, ice-cream and the forementioned donught-like "papanasi".

I could write a short list of favourite places in Bucharest if anyone is interested - not only romanian fare, but belgian, german and japanese also.

Must try while in Bucharest: the pretzels they sell warm at a miriad of kiosks in the city, and the romanian doghnut (not the "papanasi", this is a round fluffy thing, deep fried and dipped in sugar, kinda like beignets but bigger)

The home cooking: Romania has a pretty long history (it goes way back b.c.) - and the cuisine over the first few centuries was basically roasted meats (oh, the lamb cooked on coal underground! it's called "haiducesc", very seldom found in the mountain region nowadays) and whatever vegetables. Besides, the romanian cuisine was influenced by all it's invaders (romans and turks being the most notable) and each region has specific foods that were adapted (or adopted? ) from their neighbors. There's also a french influence (shown mostly in stews) dating from the times when Bucharest was called "Little Paris" (between the WWars) - that's when french culture made it's mark on Romania.

And then there's the Ceausescu days, when meat (and eggs, and everything else but produce) was a black market item.

I'll try to make a short list of foods that romanians cook in their homes on a daily basis, and that they would never-ever serve their guests, because they find these foods to be too "common". And it's a shame they think this way.(So, magnolia, if you read this, yes - they were putting on the Ritz for you)

Fried fish, served with polenta and garlic sauce

(there's also a salt-grilled fish with garlic and hot pepper sauce that is notable)

Vegetable stews - with or without meat, one or multiple vegetables, and I'll mention here a pea stew that I love (I have the recipe), but there are so many: leeks with olives, green beans, cabbage (sweet or sour), potato stew (poor man's food)..........Many of them have the same base: softened onions, a bit of flour, tomato sauce (or fresh tomatoes), herbs.

mushrooms in a flour-based sauce (also a chicken in this kind of sauce), goes well with polenta

eggplant, kind of greek style

dried white beans stew with sausage or smoked hocks/ham (this is considered the poor man's food also, and it's sooooo good)

pilafs, several kind - chicken pilaf, tomatoes and bell-pepper, mushroom (risotto-like)

For desserts, there's a number of pies, many of them regional, a flat fried dough that is much like a cross between naan bread and doghnut (sprinkled with confectioner's sugar) and much more.

I'll stop here, I don't even know if it's of any interest. However, I'm open to questions.

Forgot to mention: you'd be surprised to see a romanian cookbook: 500+pages

Edited April 28, 2003 by Mistinguett (log)

[anil]

.....

I could write a short list of favourite places in Bucharest if anyone is interested - not only romanian fare, but belgian, german and japanese also.

......

Only if you mix it with some bargain places to stay (if you remember ) OTP is on my to-do list.

[Jon Tseng]

How do you find it compares to other Eastern European grub?

Found that the ciorba di burta was fun but after that I got a bit bored of //another// 200g of grilled fillet.

For my reckoning (better first):

Polish

Czech

Romanian

Haven't been to Hungary, but have heard it is good too

J

[fresh_a]

Give this link a try:

Salon Articles on Romania

[Mistinguett]

......

Only if you mix it with some bargain places to stay (if you remember ) OTP is on my to-do list.

Edited April 29, 2003 by Mistinguett (log)

[Mistinguett]

Give this link a try:

Salon Articles on Romania

The dogs are gone for the most part. There have been some good things happening in the last 2-3 years, mostly in Bucharest.

Edited April 29, 2003 by Mistinguett (log)

[Jon Tseng]

hear hear for inyourpocket

excellent and up to date guides

J