We often get asked where you can find the best Romanian food in Bucharest.
When it comes to restaurants, we have always had a fondness for Bistro Atheneu, while Rossetya and Locanta Jaristea have plenty going for them.
Recent additions to the Romanian restaurant scene include the rather good Transilvania Regia, as well as the Hanu’ Berarilor.
All of the above have good things to offer, as do any number of good, cheap, Romanian restaurants we have failed to mention, but which we review at Bucharest In Your Pocket.
If you extend the choice, however, to include a few places that you might not expect to find great food, then the list of possible contenders for ‘best Romanian food in town’ gets much longer.
Our current favourite is – of all things – a supermarket. Namely Auchan, in Titan.
Auchan is, we should say, our favourite Bucharest supermarket. Though it is a bit rough and ready, stack ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap, it stocks just about everything you need, and sells by far the cheapest bottle of Veuve Clicquot in Bucharest (a bottle here costs not a lot more than a glass of the same at the Hilton’s English Bar).
Our only complaint is that it does not sell Lurpak butter (we need to go elsewhere for that – Fonzi or Mega Image) and the fruit and vegetables are not up to much (but then they aren’t much to much in any Bucharest supermarket).
The hot deli counter here is quite frankly a terrific place to get your hands on good, cheap Romanian food. This morning, while doing the weekly shop, we stopped by and bought ficatei de pui, sarmale, ciorba and musaca.
Sunday lunch dealt with in one full swoop.
We have not even mentioned the pui la rotisor, the sausages, the grilled trout, the tocanita de legume or the ciolan de porc cu fasole. They have it all: it is all cooked fresh there and is as good as anything you will eat in a Romanian restaurant in Bucharest. In the case of the sarmale and the ciorbe you will have to go a long way (probably to you mother-in-law’s) to find better. They are really that good.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
@Geronimo Have asked myself this self-same question. You always see old women with turnips, honey and the like, but never good old sarmale. I will have a word with my mother-in-law.
Nothing beats home cooked though. Some enterprising village grannies really ought to set up road side sarmale stalls. They’d clean up from the Bucharest traffic returning to the city after the weekend. I’d import them to the UK if I could
I usually tell my acquaintances from abroad when faced with the “best food in Bucharest” question to take a maxi-taxi or hire a car and just pop over to Russe in Bulgaria, just 45min drive from Bucharest. The Bulgarian cuisine is a master-class in its own right with a millennial tradition within the Byzantine and Ottoman world. The Romanian fare is on the same position, or even worse, as the English 1970s food to French cuisine, when the two are compared.
I wrote here a comment on an older Telegraph article about restaurants in Romania, where the writer clearly noticed that the food is only foreign fare in the town’s rip off luxury restaurants, and that quite bland and execrably produced in my opinion: http://ow.ly/UQao
An alternative to find “best Romanian food” would be to ask Elena Udrea and her army of tourism ministry officials