Bittersweet: A restaurant for Yugoslav nostalgia

Kafana, in the East Village, serves Serbian specialties and welcomes Serbs, Croats and Bosnians alike.

Matt McAllesterJune 28, 2009 07:24Updated May 30, 2010 11:58

A member of U.N. special forces holds his weapon as a Serb girl waits to welcome Serbian President Boris Tadic during his visit to the isolated village of Cernica in Kosovo Jan. 31, 2008. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

In Bittersweet, a new column on GlobalPost, Matt McAllester writes about how food connects us and the people who cook it to faraway lands. McAllester is also the author of "Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother’s Kitchen."

NEW YORK — Every now and then a Serbian nationalist shows up in Kafana expecting to find like-minded people. An understandable mistake, perhaps, considering that Kafana is New York’s only Serbian restaurant and is decked out with framed postcards of old Belgrade, an icon of a Serbian Orthodox saint and a banner from Red Star Belgrade, the favorite soccer team of the country’s former paramilitary killers. But a mistake nonetheless, as owner Vladimir Ocokoljic points out to his unwanted visitors.

“Those people come in and ask, ‘Can you play some of our music?’” Ocokoljic said while sitting at a corner table in his restaurant on a recent afternoon. By “our music” Ocokoljic was referring to the ulta-nationalist, aggressive and now very unfashionable turbo-folk dance music, which was popular among nationalist Serbs during the wars of the 1990s.

Ocokoljic, who emigrated from Belgrade in 1990, declines their requests. He’s more of a Ramones man. Pretty soon they move on.

This is a Serbian restaurant, for sure, but it’s “one of those places where everyone comes in,” Ocokoljic said, and, as if by magic, a family of three walks in off Avenue C. “For example, these are some of my best customers. They’re Bosnians.”

I sat with Ocokoljic, sharing a bottle of good Alsatian Riesling — a gift from a “cute” Serbian girl who lives in Boston, he explained — and a plate of dimljena vesalica, which is described on the menu as “thinly sliced smoked pork loin.” I had enjoyed Kafana’s food two nights earlier, when I had dined there with my wife, but the pork loin was in a different league. Tender and relatively light compared to the peasant sausage and cevapi we had had two nights earlier, it is supplied by Muncan Food Corp, a deli in Queens owned by two guys from the Vojvodina region of Serbia — one an ethnic Romanian, one an ethnic Serb (no one ever said the Balkans were simple). It is addictive.

I have not always found food in the Balkans to be so good. I first went there in 1999, on the first morning of the Kosovo war, and I don’t remember a huge number of delectable mouthfuls in the decade I’ve been visiting since. Here are some things I do remember, although I would rather not: ketchup as the stand-in for tomato sauce on pizza; mopping up the oil from fried eggs with a paper napkin before eating breakfast; and consuming cevapi, the Balkans’ legendary fingers of grilled ground meat, that later made me feel like an alien had taken up residence in my stomach.

Kafana’s food is not like that. It is as comforting and welcoming as its atmosphere and its owner. It’s certainly hearty but if you’re not quite hungry enough for Ocokoljic’s mother’s lamb and spinach stew or the triple-decker protein-fest of prunes stuffed with walnuts and cheese rolled in bacon with chicken liver rolled in bacon you can opt for fish, five different salads or chicken kebabs.

The kupus, a simple salad of chopped cabbage with oil and vinegar, was an upmarket, more elegant version of the kupus that I loved in the Balkans, even in the least promising roadside cafe. The simplest dishes can be good when they’re bad, and when they’re done with the care Kafana takes with them, they’re great.