One of the most exciting new bars in Berlin is not on Kantstrasse, not in Kreuzberg or on the Spree in Mitte, but on a side street in Wedding. On the ground floor of a rather unattractive apartment building from the 1980s, “Sarajevo” opened last year, a Bosnian snack bar that is currently reviving the forgotten Balkan cuisine.
Whoever turns from Müllerstraße, one of the main axes through Wedding, into the surprisingly wide, almost boulevard-like Triftstraße, past Turkish supermarkets, late-night shops and obscure bars, can already see the green awnings and sunshades of Sarajevo from afar on the right. The place is always full; only with luck you get hold of one of the coveted tables outside. Bosnian families and groups of friends sit outside and inside, but there are also workmen in overalls after work, residents from the neighborhood and Berlin star chefs and food bloggers who know that despite the informal atmosphere, the food here is spectacular.
The strudel dough here is so thin you could read the Instagram comments behind it
Of course, Sarajevo has the best cevapcici north of Banja Luka, prepared on a grill in the open kitchen behind the counter. Of course, there’s a sensational shopska salad of tomatoes, peppers and onions, topped with generous amounts of grated sheep’s cheese, not to mention the homemade flatbread that’s also placed on the grill, under the Ćevapčići. But the reason why both Bosnian families and star chefs regularly come to Sarajevo is the burek, wafer-thin filo pastry filled with minced meat. In the back of the small kitchen you can watch the chefs work the dough and then swirl it through the air until it’s so thin that, to adapt an old Austrian proverb to the age of food bloggers, you can see your Instagram comments could read behind it.
The demand for this dish is so great, both from the guests in the restaurant and from the many takeaway orders (cars are constantly double-parked in front of the Sarajevo), that the fresh strudels are pushed into the showcases practically without interruption. Meat burek is the main thing here, although Ibrahim Yusuf, the man behind the counter, objects to the phrase: “Never say ‘meat burek’. It just means ‘burek’. If you say ‘meat burek’, you offend you the cook.” Burek with cheese, which is also available in Sarajevo, is called “Sirnica”.
Ibrahim, a man in his thirties who is always friendly and polite even in the busiest crowd, says that the restaurant was opened in lockdown by his uncle, Hajredin Yusuf. In the Wedding pizzeria, where he had worked for years, he was fired because of the Corona crisis. “And then,” says Ibrahim, “he remembered that his father had been running a grill restaurant in Sarajevo for a long time.” Together with seven or eight family members, nephews, brothers-in-law and cousins, some of whom moved to Berlin from Bosnia, he opened the restaurant named after his hometown, which has quickly become a gastronomic institution. The Sarajevo: in Berlin the official place for the cuisine of the former Yugoslavia, just like the “Adana Grillhaus” in Kreuzberg’s Manteuffelstraße for Turkish food or the “Austria” on Marheinekeplatz for Wiener Schnitzel. It’s no longer a surprise that they serve homemade baklava and a first-class espresso for dessert.
Balkan restaurants have all but disappeared from the cityscape of German cities for a long time. If a leftover “Dalmacija” or “Opatija” appears between the pizzerias and Asian bistros, burger shops, kebab shops and sushi bars, preferably on arterial roads, far beyond the center, then the somewhat faded curtains already mark the outdated this place. The dining area of the old Balkan restaurants is usually covered in a series of shiny glass fronts that reveal the counters and tables. The threshold to enter the restaurant is therefore higher than in the surrounding bistros and bars with their huge windows; The last remaining “Dalmacija Grills” therefore have almost no walk-in customers, only an ever smaller group of regular guests.
In the heyday of Yugoslav cuisine in Germany, in the 1970s and 1980s, the restaurants were always busy. We never went there without my father making a prior reservation over the phone. For many years, the “Opatija” in the city center was also our familiar place for family celebrations, on Christmas Day, at christenings or round birthdays. A long table was set at the back of the restaurant, the liveried waiters took orders, and I remember that, despite the festive occasion, there were never appetizers, not even a basket of bread on the table; everyone knew that would have been superfluous in anticipation of the quantities of meat and pastries. (Only one gluttonous uncle was the only one who ordered a Serbian bean soup, which he then spooned up with hectic movements.)
When I usually ordered a portion of cevapcici, raznjici or pola pola, “half half” during normal visits during the week, only with my parents, the large grill plates were also allowed at family meals, the “gourmand plates”, “robber’s feast” or ” National Plate” (Yugoslavia was still a united country shortly after Tito’s death). Their composition always consisted of the same, only slightly varied components; in addition to Ćevapčići and raznjici, the small pork steaks on a skewer, Pljeskavica, beef steaks and liver, plus Djuvec rice, French fries, which were particularly crispy with Yugoslavs, raw onions and the wonderful Ajvar, which we always reordered.
I always told the waiter that I liked my grill plate “without liver”, but this was often forgotten in the kitchen. The dark pieces of meat, checkered by the rust, were not easy to distinguish on the plate, which is why I involuntarily bit into a piece of liver. The disgust hit me with the force of an electric shock. It was impossible to say how I first recognized the mishap: by the unexpected elasticity with which the supposed piece of meat yielded in the mouth, or by its strange, dull taste. In any case, it was impossible to swallow the mouthful after discovering the fatal error, and so I put the fork to my mouth with the greatest possible casualness in order to spit out the liver unnoticed and pushed it under the salad garnish (thankful hiding place on the plates of middle-class restaurants).
My mother, who wasn’t much for grilled meat, usually ate sarma, minced cabbage stuffed with cream sauce, at “Opatija” – the closest thing to vegetarian food you could get in a Yugoslav eatery. For dessert there was nut pancakes, followed by schnapps for the adults, whose unintelligible names sounded like slurring even when they were sober. Spicy white for men, sweet yellow for women, served in pear-shaped, narrow-necked glasses. After the third round, we children had been wanting to go home for a long time and were hunched against the backs of our chairs, the table was filled with the hoarse laughter of my great-uncle Karl, a red-nosed former waiter in the grand hotels of Prague and Vienna. At home he was always called “the funny one”; I didn’t realize until many years later that that was a euphemism for “drinker”.
Yugoslav restaurants closed because the war and the fate of the relatives thwarted the life plans of the operators
In the early 1990s, the number of Yugoslavian bars in Germany declined rapidly for two reasons. On the one hand, the Balkan cuisine did not get along with the increasing desire for a light, low-meat diet; Thai restaurants came into vogue, followed by Vietnamese and Korean, and finally poke bars and vegan food bowl bistros. Thirty years ago, however, these culinary tendencies went hand in hand with the political catastrophe of the civil war, and the disintegration of the nation was reflected on a small scale in the gastronomic world of Germany. Yugoslav restaurants closed because the war and the fate of the relatives thwarted the life plans of the operators and employees. And the bars that went on repeated the divisions and particularizations in south-eastern Europe, renamed themselves, and removed all elements of now hostile regions from their menus.
Perhaps the best Yugoslavian restaurant in Munich, opened by the former manager of “Opatija”, was the “Belgrad Grill” on Dachauer Strasse. One day in 1992 or 1993 the wall of the corner house suddenly read “Slovenia Grill” and since the new word was a third longer than the old one, a different font had to be used for the illuminated letters, which gave the logo a crack reminiscent of that in the owners’ country of origin. The newly printed menu of the “Slowenija Grill” was changed in some places. The “Serbian bean soup” had lost its attribute, the “Serbian rice meat” was now called “Hungarian rice meat” in a geopolitically neutral way. The “Funny Bosnjak”, on the other hand, a rump steak stuffed with ham and sheep’s cheese, remained on the menu If memory serves me correctly, the manager came from Belgrade, but the customer-oriented consideration of making the small Slovenia, which was quickly accepted as an independent state, the new patron of his establishment, outweighed the insistence on the name of his warring homeland.
The city of Sarajevo, located in a valley, was besieged and shelled between 1992 and 1996, more than ten thousand people died, but thirty years later, the restaurant of the same name in Berlin-Wedding is, as Ibrahim Jusuf emphasizes, a place of encounter and reconciliation. “Two thirds of our guests come from the former Yugoslavia; Bosnians and Serbs, Croats and Macedonians, Slovenians and Montenegrins sit with us,” he says. “The food connects them. They are there to eat burek and lamb chops, but also just to have a coffee or to sit together.”
All those who are enthusiastic about the cuisine of the former Yugoslavia also come to Trifststraße, in the direction of the green awnings and umbrellas. In Sarajevo, the almost extinct “Dalmacija Grills” and “Opatijas” are returning, in a more open, airy form. The exciting grilled taste of Ćevapčići, Djuvec rice, ajvar. Only schnapps is not available here. There is still a lot of laughter at the tables.