Meat on Bread: Burek, Ljubljana

Across the Earth a common language unites us all, unspoken in its ubiquity. We call it meat on bread.

It’s been said that the greatest, or at least the most successful cultural export of all time is the Irish bar. Wherever you are in the world, you can likely find an establishment that will furnish you with an overpriced and generally quite bad pint of the black stuff to be supped to the dulcet tones of a tin-whistle compilation CD. Ljubljana is no exception. I prefer authenticity over familiarity from my foreign watering holes, and thus resist the call of Slovene creamers, pushing on past The Corner Pub to find a spot with local beers and žganje: unaged fruit brandy.

The bartender’s English is good, his knowledge of beer expansive and a few hours later I wish him well, slosh out, and set my sights on arguably the world’s second greatest cultural export: a döner kebab. Shouldn’t be difficult, I’ve seen plenty of the telltale restaurant edifices dotted around the city. Or so I thought. No, it turns out Slovenia took a different path from the rest of Europe with respect to crepuscular Anatolian delights. What I thought were kebab shops turned out to be selling burek.

Baked until crisp in thick round pans, displayed under glass and served by the slice, the myopic amongst us may mistake these pekarna for a New York style pizza joint, were it not for the good 4 cm thickness of the slices (wedge is probably more accurate). The iconic Turkish börek, the type that’s rolled up from a long tube into a spiral of stuffed filo pastry, is absent here: the ones in Ljubljana comprise layers of filo and scattered filling throughout, a puck of chaotic lasagna, encased in a final skin of dough. A crisp flaky oil-soaked exterior and moist inner layers of pastry, tender like pasta.

So I’m told by some locals the best in the biz is Olimpija Burek, around since 1979 (older than the modern country itself) and slinging burek 24-7. It’s hard to disagree. A couple euros gets you a tremendous portion, and they have a tight menu of 6 or so flavours; something for everyone including mesni burek (savoury minced meat and onions), sirov burek (tangy cottage cheese), and even jabolčni burek (sweet apple filling). What shines brightly above the rest though, is the pica burek, or pizza burek. Much as in the UK, one can find the questionable fusion of Turkish döner on an ‘Italian’ pizza (pizza being another cultural export to rival the Irish bar) so too in Slovenia can you find Italian pizza inside a burek. Cheese, ham, mushrooms, herby tomato sauce (some other places I tried add pepperoni), it’s a portable wedge of deep dish that Olimpija was the first to offer in Ljubljana, and when I order one the paper sleeve it’s handed to me in is already translucent with oily orange nectar. A serious handful of napkins are required to exert a modicum of (greasy) grip on the smooth and slick carton of accompanying drinking yoghurt.

Walking back to the hotel, wedge in hand I do finally spot a place that sells kebab, but closer inspection reveals it to sell Bosnian cevapi, rather than the rotating Elephant's foot I am used to: I suppose Slovenian burek arrived indirectly through Balkan (ultimately Ottoman) culinary influences diffusing up through land borders rather than through immigration as with UK kebabs. Burek may not be in the cultural big leagues of four-leaf clover signs and Planxty over the speakers, but it manages to hold its own in Ljubljana, and makes so much more sense for a walking (or stumbling) food than loose ribbons of meat and salad in a pita. The UK would do well to adopt and co-opt the burek. Who knows, maybe we’ll put our own spin on things. Perhaps I'll live long enough to see the döner-pizza burek served on our streets, perfect for soaking up one too many Jamesons at the end of the night. ⚭