We’re Calling it: The Next Big City for Food-lovers is Bucharest, Romania
“We want to know where you’d go for dinner with friends,” I ask the cool young clerk behind the desk at the Moxy Bucharest Old Town. He takes my phone and decisively taps in a recommendation. “This is if you want Romanian food in a very nice place.”
In the golden early evening, my boyfriend and I arrive at Soro Lume, about 10 minutes by taxi from the heart of town. We take a seat beneath festoon lights in the restaurant’s leafy courtyard, while chefs in black T-shirts tend the woodfired oven in the open kitchen. I know the fundamentals of the local cuisine – carp, polenta, pork, cabbage – but there’s nothing humble about the menu here. The white river fish is served in a pool of outrageously green burnt herb sauce and topped with fennel flowers. Polenta comes cut in cubes, charred and piled on top of smoked sour cream. Pork, an unctuous brick of slow-cooked meat, is accompanied by a neat parcel of cabbage in “three textures”. The wine list is mostly crisp, white and regional. Pálinka – heady fruit brandy – is heartily encouraged.
Soro Lume’s neo-Romanian cuisine isn’t the only surprise in the capital. You can find Greek, Korean, Spanish and Filipino food here, too. The city – a bit Budapest, a bit Berlin – is a curious mix of influences. Vampire tours lean into the country’s fanged folklore and communist-era structures sit in contrast to 1700s Orthodox churches. It’s home to the biggest fountain show and the largest parliament building in the world (a castle by Australian standards) but among the big things, it’s the little things that charm. The seasonal brunch and very good coffee at Trofic (Strada Ion Brezoianu 29; +40 751 276 600), a small café near pretty Cișmigiu Park. The wall-to-wall treasures and trinkets at antique store Cufărul Cu Vechituri. The Lego-piece “tapestries” on the walls at restaurant Lacrimi și Sfinți, a retreat in the bustling Old Town where mussels come from the Black Sea, catfish from the Danube Delta and cheese from Transylvania.
At Hanu’ lui Manuc, the oldest hotel in the city and a spot almost every local we meet tells us to visit, the circa-1808 inn’s beer garden is packed. The menu is pan-European, the brews crafty and the crowd diverse and happy. Here, like Bucharest itself, what’s old is new again.
