Eating and Drinking
Bulgaria is stuffed full of vegetable plots and orchards, and fresh fruit and vegetables are half the secret of Bulgarian food. In the villages, almost all the food comes straight from the land and is organic or free range, as few people can afford pesticides or chemical fertilizers. In the towns, however, 45 years of collectivized agriculture and catering have conspired to impose a certain conformity on restaurants, and the high quality and range of cooking you'll experience as a guest in a Bulgarian home is still rarely reflected in the country's eating establishments. Grilled meat dishes predominate everywhere, and, despite the wide range and quality of the vegetables available, vegetarians may well be frustrated by the lack of animal-free options. Though the newer restaurants tend to offer more variety, menus remain pretty unimaginative, with a limited choice of dishes on offer. There is, however, an increasing variety of street food available, although traditional Bulgarian pastries and snacks are often a bit too stodgy and greasy for Western tastes. In big towns and coastal resorts, food shops ( hranitelni stoki ) are reasonably well stocked with useful domestic picnic ingredients such as fresh bread, cheese ( kashkaval Vitosha is made from cow's milk; kashkaval Balkan from ewe's milk), sausages ( pastarma is a spicy beef salami; sudzhuk a flat home-cured sausage), smoked leg of ham ( pushen but ) and dairy products, as well as tinned goods, packet soups, conserves and chocolates imported from Greece or Turkey. In rural areas, food shops are much more sparsely provisioned, with shelves lined with jars of Bulgarian jam, packets of dry biscuits, and little else. Instant coffee is usually vile, and tea is either Chinese or herbal, so it's wise to bring both if you're planning on self-catering. Fresh fruit and veg is best bought in the outdoor markets ( pazar ) which you'll find in most towns and villages. Here smallholding peasants from the outlying districts sell whatever produce is currently in season, as well as herbs, nuts, sunflower seeds, dried fruit and pulses. Many towns also have old-style, municipally run indoor markets ( hali ), though these tend to be sad, half-abandoned affairs with little to offer. Ad hoc street stalls often sell foreign produce such as bananas, coffee and chocolate. City-centre bakeries tend to produce fresh bread ( hlyab ) throughout the day. In smaller towns and villages, shops selling bread stand empty for much of the day, until an arbitrarily timed delivery attracts queues of shoppers.
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