Christmas in Bratislava

Originally posted December 23, 2006

All the best wishes of the Season.

Some people have asked us about food in Bratislava. So far it has been quite good. We have easy access to groceries. There is a Tesco hypermarket just across the street. Tesco is a large British chain and a “hypermarket” is a large supermarket. They have a wide variety of groceries, but it is always very crowded, with long lines and rather dour workers at the checkout stands. There is also an old fashioned butcher store in the ground floor of our apartment. It is old fashioned in two ways: one, it still has butchers who wait on you and cut meat to order and two, it has the style of Russian stores where you order what you want, then go and pay at a central cashier and then go back with the slip showing you paid to pick up your purchase.

We are also next to the Stara Trznica or “Old Market”, which has vegetable and fruit stalls, flower stalls and several bread, pastry, wine, and other stalls. Think of a small version of the Pike Place Market. We frequently shop at a smaller grocery, called Teta, which has better baked goods and is not as crowded as Tesco.

We also occasionally go to Carrefour, a very large French chain at a nearby shopping center. It is definitely up market from Tesco, is larger and carries more and better items. However it is a tram ride away so we don’t go there very often.

Our biggest problem has been learning the Slovak names of various items we want to buy. Eggs, (vajce), milk (mlieko) , and bread (chlieb) are easy: you just pick them off the shelves. Butter (maslo) and cheese (syr) were more difficult since you had to figure out which small package was butter and what kind of butter. Getting the names of cheeses down was also complex. However the biggest problem was flour and sugar. Each came in various varieties, such as finely ground, rye flour, whole wheat flour, etc. Sugar was confectioners, coffee sugar, brown sugar, baking sugar, etc. I ended up accidentally buying corn flour, which actually works pretty well for flouring meat before you cook it. I am not so sure about baking.

We find that we go out to eat much more frequently than we do in Seattle. Most restaurants are very reasonably priced and there are probably at least 50 restaurants within easy walking distance of our flat. Most of them are quite good, with a variety of cuisines available. This time of year we have been going to the Christmas Markets a lot. These are stalls set up in the two main squares in Bratislava. This is a tradition of Central Europe. It is very big in Vienna and parts of Germany. There have been Christmas Markets in Bratislava since 1993, shortly after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. The City representatives were inspired by other similar markets, but with a distinct Slovak twist. There is a bigger focus on food in Bratislava than in Vienna. Favorites are Ciganska, which is Gypsy or Roma grilled pork or chicken steak grilled with onions, Kapustnica, which is the red-colored paprika and saurkraut soup flavored with meat or sausages and our favorite, Pleskavica, which is a beef patty grilled on a charcoal grill and served on bread cooked on the grill. The proprietor was insulted when I called it a hamburger since he said it was much better than a hamburger. He was right.
The main drink available is a hot mulled wine, which tastes particularly good on a cold winter evening. They also have Medovina, which is a hot mead or honey wine. They also have various Slovakian pastries which are traditional this time of the year. We have our choice of Lokse which is a thin potato crepe filled with chocolate, almonds or poppy seeds or a cherry and poppy seed strudel.

The last few days there have been live carp booths in front of Tesco and at the Christmas Markets. The proprietors of the booths scoop up the flopping carp, weigh it and give it to the next in the long line waiting for the carp. Fried carp is a typical Slovakian dish served on Christmas Eve. In lieu of that we are going out to one of our favorite restaurants.

We wish you a Merry Christmas, or in Slovakian, Vesele Vianoce a Novy Rok praje!

Chuck and Susan Routh