Bulgarian Food: 20 Traditional Dishes and What They Are

Bulgarian food is built on white brined cheese, thick sour yogurt, peppers and the grill, and the dishes to try first are banitsa, shopska salad, tarator, kebapche and Bulgarian moussaka. Below are 20 traditional Bulgarian dishes, what each one is made of, when Bulgarians eat it, and the name to point at on a menu.

I expected Bulgarian cuisine to be heavy, meaty and greasy. What I got instead were cold soups, enormous salads, baked vegetable dishes and more yogurt than I have eaten anywhere else. This is what I ate, plus the dishes every Bulgarian I asked told me I had missed.

The 20 Bulgarian dishes at a glance

The 20 traditional Bulgarian dishes to eat in Bulgaria are listed below, each with what it is and when it is eaten.

1. Banitsa: filo layered with eggs, yogurt and sirene, eaten for breakfast.
2. Shopska salad: tomato, cucumber, onion and pepper under grated white cheese, eaten first.
3. Bulgarian yogurt (kiselo mlyako): milk soured with the bacterium named after the country.
4. Sirene and kashkaval: the white brined cheese and the yellow cheese behind everything else.
5. Tarator: cold yogurt and cucumber soup with dill and garlic, drunk all summer.
6. Bob chorba: bean soup with summer savory, from the monasteries.
7. Shkembe chorba: tripe soup with paprika, ordered the morning after.
8. Kebapche: grilled minced meat in a long roll, spiced with cumin.
9. Kyufte: the same meat as a flattened ball, with onion and parsley in it.
10. Meshana skara: the mixed grill plate that puts all of the above on one dish.
11. Lukanka: flat pressed salami, dried for weeks, served in thin cold slices.
12. Kavarma: pork or chicken slow-cooked in wine in a sealed clay pot.
13. Gyuvech: the vegetable stew named after the pot it is baked in.
14. Bulgarian moussaka: potatoes and minced meat under a yogurt-and-egg topping, not béchamel.
15. Sarmi: cabbage or vine leaves rolled around rice and meat, seasonal by leaf.
16. Chushki byurek: red peppers stuffed with cheese and egg, then fried.
17. Mish-mash: tomatoes, peppers and onions scrambled with eggs and sirene.
18. Lyutenitsa: pepper and tomato relish, spread on bread at any hour.
19. Mekitsi: deep-fried yogurt dough, eaten hot for breakfast.
20. Garash cake: a flourless walnut and chocolate cake from Ruse.

What Bulgarian food is built on

Bulgarian food rests on four things: dairy, peppers, herbs and fire. Bulgarian cuisine belongs to the Balkans and carries a heavy Ottoman inheritance, which is why moussaka, gyuvech, kyufte, baklava and ayran appear here under Bulgarian names.

Two ingredients turn up in almost everything. Sirene, the white brined cheese, goes into salads, pastries, stuffed peppers and eggs. Kiselo mlyako, the sour yogurt, is eaten plain, drunk as ayran, thinned into soup and beaten over a moussaka. Peppers do the rest, raw in salads, roasted into relishes, stuffed, or dried and ground into the red powder in the salt cellar.

The method is the third thing. Deep-frying is uncommon, grilling is everywhere, and the rest of the kitchen runs on slow water-based stews baked in earthenware. In place of salt and pepper, most tables carry sharena sol: salt mixed with sweet red pepper and chubritsa, summer savory, the herb that makes Bulgarian food taste Bulgarian.

1. Banitsa (баница)

Banitsa is whisked eggs, plain yogurt and crumbled sirene layered between sheets of filo and baked, and it is eaten hot or cold for breakfast with yogurt, ayran or boza. The name comes from a South Slavic root meaning “to fold”, and at home the dough is stretched by hand until it is less than a millimetre thick.

Banitsa is also the dish Bulgarians tell fortunes with. On Christmas and New Year’s Eve, kasmeti, lucky charms, are baked into it: usually pieces of a dogwood branch, where the number of buds says which wish you have drawn, from health and love to a baby, wealth or travel. Nowadays people add a coin, or wishes written on paper and wrapped in foil. The pie is cut into as many pieces as there are people, plus two more for the house and the Virgin Mary, then spun so nobody chooses their own fortune.

Tikvenik and the other banitsa fillings

Banitsa changes name with its filling. Tikvenik is the pumpkin version, with sugar, walnuts and cinnamon, and it is a dessert rather than a breakfast. Zelnik covers the green fillings, from spinach and sorrel to chard, nettles and sauerkraut. If a bakery window holds four trays of what looks like the same pastry, that is what you are looking at. Bulgaria holds a Festival of the Banitsa in early May.

2. Shopska salad (шопска салата)

Shopska salad is chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onion and raw or roasted peppers under a heavy mound of grated sirene, dressed with sunflower or olive oil and sometimes vinegar, and it is served cold at the start of a meal. It is the dish most often named as Bulgaria’s national dish, and if you know Greek salad, expect something milder: sirene rather than feta, grated in a mound rather than laid on in a slab. I ate it four times in a week without getting tired of it.

The story behind it is younger than most people assume. Shopska salad was created by Balkantourist, Bulgaria’s state tourism organisation, which named it in 1956 and first served it at the Chernomorets restaurant in the Black Sea resort of Druzhba, now St Constantine and Helena, near Varna. Its development is credited to Petar Doychev, who described it as a continuation of an earlier Balkantourist “harvest salad”, and for years it appeared only in Balkantourist hotels before being adopted as a national symbol in the 1970s and 1980s.

You will often read that the white, green and red were chosen to match the Bulgarian flag. The reference record calls that resemblance a coincidence later embraced rather than a design brief. The name comes from the Shopluk region of western Bulgaria, though the salad did not originate there, and in 2014 it was the most popular recipe in the European Parliament’s A Taste of Europe initiative.

Ovcharska salata, snezhanka and turshiya

Three more Bulgarian salads are worth ordering, and each one is a variation on the same short ingredient list.

• Ovcharska salata: shopska salad with grated boiled egg, mushrooms and sometimes ham added, served the same way.
• Snezhanka: strained yogurt with cucumber, garlic, dill and oil, sometimes with walnuts or roasted peppers, served cold and thick. It is also called suh tarator, dry tarator, and it is named for being almost entirely white.
• Turshiya: pickled celery, beetroot, cauliflower and cabbage, served through the winter as a side.

3. Bulgarian yogurt (kiselo mlyako)

Bulgarian yogurt is milk fermented with two organisms working together, Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, and it is eaten plain, beside a main course, or stirred into salads, soups and pastry fillings. Its Bulgarian name, kiselo mlyako, means sour milk, and Bulgarians eat more of it per head than the rest of Europe.

The bacterium is named after the country because of one man. Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian medical student, identified it in 1905 at the age of 27, in Professor Léon Massol’s laboratory in Geneva, and published his findings the same year in the Revue Médicale de la Suisse Romande under the title Étude sur une lait fermenté comestible: Le “Kissélo mléko” de Bulgarie. The organism was subsequently named Bacillus bulgaricus in Bulgaria’s honour, became Lactobacillus bulgaricus, and was reclassified in 1984 as a subspecies of Lactobacillus delbrueckii. It is still the only bacterium named after a country because of a national dish.

Grigorov’s work reached Ilya Mechnikov, the Nobel laureate at the Institut Pasteur, who hypothesised that eating yogurt explained the long lives of Bulgarian villagers. That was a hypothesis, not a finding, and it was questioned after a 1920 study showed the bacterium does not survive in the human intestine. The claim that Bulgarian yogurt makes you live longer traces back to it and has never been demonstrated.

What is documented is the protection. In July 2023 the European Commission entered both Bulgarsko kiselo mlyako and Bulgarian white brined cheese, Bulgarsko byalo salamureno sirene, in its register of protected geographical names. Bulgarian law goes further: the name kiselo mlyako is reserved for milk fermented with those two organisms alone, at no fewer than ten million colony-forming units per gram and with no additives, and anything else must be sold as “yogurt” or “lactic acid product”. Bulgaria holds a Yogurt Fest in late June.

Ayran

Ayran is yogurt thinned with water and salted, served cold with breakfast or lunch and usually beside a pastry. Some versions are lightly carbonated and some add mint. It is what Bulgarians drink with a banitsa, and one glass is enough to understand why a salty yogurt drink works with a salty cheese pastry.

4. Sirene and kashkaval

Sirene is a white brined cheese made from goat, sheep, cow or buffalo milk, aged at least three months, and served as a table cheese and in almost every salad, pastry and baked dish in this guide. It is slightly crumbly, slightly grainy, and milder than feta, which is the comparison every visitor reaches for first.

Kashkaval is the other half of the Bulgarian cheese board. The word covers essentially all yellow cheeses, and English menus translate the pair as “white cheese” and “yellow cheese”. Kashkaval Vitosha is made from cow’s milk and kashkaval Balkan from ewe’s milk.

Ask for either one breaded and fried and you get sirene pane or kashkaval pane, the country’s default bar snack. Sirene also goes over kachamak, the Bulgarian cornmeal, and into yaytsa po panagyurski, eggs over mashed sirene with yogurt, garlic, parsley and walnuts.

5. Tarator

Tarator is a cold soup of yogurt, finely chopped cucumber, garlic and dill, loosened with water and oil and served chilled, and it usually has crushed walnuts in it. It is a summer dish, and in July it is on every menu in the country.

Its ancestor is an Ottoman meze of the same yogurt, cucumber, garlic and walnuts, which is why versions turn up across the Balkans under related names. Walnuts are common rather than compulsory, so a bowl without them is not a mistake.

My guide Anita tried to explain the recipe to me and could not find the English word for walnuts, so she called them “the nuts that look like brains”. We talked about brain nuts for the rest of the trip.

6. Bob chorba

Bob chorba is a soup of dry beans, onions, tomatoes and carrots seasoned with chubritsa, summer savory, or dzhodzhen, spearmint, and it is served hot with bread. The name simply means bean soup, and local versions drop the carrots or add paprika, potatoes or meat.

It has been a staple at Bulgarian monasteries for centuries, which is part of why it sits on the meatless Christmas Eve table, and it is one of the few Bulgarian mains that is reliably vegetarian.

7. Shkembe chorba

Shkembe chorba is whole pork, beef or lamb tripe boiled for hours, chopped and returned to its broth, spiced with fried ground red paprika and often finished with a little milk, and it is served hot with garlic, vinegar and chilli peppers added at the table. Some guides describe it as a cold soup, which it is not.

In Bulgaria it is chiefly known as a hangover remedy. Bulgarian kitchens use the whole animal, and shkembe is the most visible result. So is drob sarma, chopped liver and lung baked with rice, browned onions and herbs, then covered with beaten eggs and yogurt and baked again. I tried liver and grilled chicken hearts on the same trip, and the hearts were better than I expected, rubbery in the way a thin sausage is rubbery.

8. Kebapche

Kebapche is minced pork and beef seasoned with black pepper, cumin and salt and shaped into a long cylinder, and it is always grilled, never fried or baked. It comes off the grill straight onto the plate, usually with chips, often with grated sirene over them and lyutenitsa on the side to dip.

It is essentially ćevapčići under a Bulgarian name, though Bulgarian kebapcheta are larger. Order in threes: troika kebapcheta s garnitura is a phrase every Bulgarian knows.

9. Kyufte

Kyufte is the same minced-meat mixture as kebapche shaped into a round or flattened ball, usually with onion and parsley worked into it, and it is grilled and served alongside its cylindrical cousin. That is the whole difference: shape, and the onion and parsley.

There is also tatarsko kyufte, a stuffed version with a filling inside the meat. Order one of each on the same plate, which is what Bulgarians do anyway.

10. Meshana skara

Meshana skara is a mixed grill plate of kebapche, kyufte, a shishche skewer and a sausage such as karnache or nadenitsa, and it is served as one shared platter with chips and salad. It is the answer to ordering for a table when nobody can agree.

The skewers are marinated chicken or pork with vegetables, karnache is the coiled spiced sausage and nadenitsa the straight one. At the far end sits cheverme, a whole animal turned over an open fire for four to seven hours, which is a festival dish rather than a menu item.

11. Lukanka

Lukanka is a semi-dried salami of pork, veal, black pepper, cumin and salt, stuffed into dried cow’s intestine and hung for 40 to 50 days in a well-ventilated place, and it is served in thin cold slices. It is pressed while it dries, which is why it is flat rather than round.

Production is concentrated in central Bulgaria at the foot of the Balkan range, around Smyadovo, Panagyurishte and Karlovo, and lukanka panagyurska holds a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed denomination in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

The other Bulgarian cured meats to look for on a meze board are banski starets, elenski but, pastarma and sujuk. Elena holds a Holiday of the Elena Pork Ham in late October.

12. Kavarma

Kavarma is pork or chicken slow-cooked with onions, peppers, tomatoes and mushrooms in wine, baked in a lidded earthenware pot called a gyuveche, and it is served in the pot it was cooked in. The lid comes off at the table and the steam is most of the pleasure.

It is cold-weather food, and because the pot is sealed and the cooking slow, the meat breaks with a fork and the sauce reduces closer to a glaze than a stew.

13. Gyuvech

Gyuvech is a Balkan vegetable stew, sometimes with meat, fish or poultry, cooked slowly and served in the earthenware pot that gives it its name. The pot came first: gyuvech is the vessel, and the dish is named after it. Some versions run to dozens of different vegetables in one pot.

It is an autumn dish, made when everything ripens at once. One night we stayed in a village outside Bozhentsi with 22 residents, two of whom ran the guesthouse: they grew their vegetables, kept cows and goats for milk, had an old woman come by to turn the milk into cheese, and baked their own bread. Dinner was shopska salad, three vegetable dishes and a baked courgette dish nobody could name, and it is the meal I still think about. Bulgarian home cooking comes out of the garden, which the Bulgarian people I met treated as unremarkable.

14. Bulgarian moussaka

Bulgarian moussaka is layered potatoes and minced pork or beef under a topping of milk or yogurt beaten with raw eggs, and it is served hot, straight from the dish. The two differences from the Greek version are the whole point: Bulgaria uses potatoes where Greece uses aubergine, and a yogurt-and-egg custard where Greece uses béchamel.

Both descend from the same Ottoman dish, and the modern Greek recipe with béchamel was created only in the 1920s, which makes it younger than the Balkan potato version it is usually compared against.

I ate mine at a restaurant in Sofia that plays traditional music and performs the fire dance. The tradition behind that show is real: nestinarstvo, a fire-walking ritual with pre-Christian roots and Orthodox elements added later, was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. The dancer picked me up and carried me across the embers, which I was glad had happened before dinner rather than after.

15. Sarmi

Sarmi are leaves rolled around a filling of rice, minced meat or both, and they are served hot with a bowl of yogurt on the side. Which leaf you get depends on the month: cabbage leaves in winter, vine leaves in spring and summer.

The winter version uses fermented cabbage, which gives the roll a sourness the vine-leaf version lacks. Bulgarian tradition puts the meatless version on the Christmas Eve table, so a lenten sarma is traditional rather than a modern substitution.

16. Chushki byurek

Chushki byurek is red peppers stuffed with sirene, eggs and herbs and then fried, and it is served hot as a starter or a light main. The pepper is roasted and peeled first, so what arrives is soft and slightly smoky around a hot cheese centre.

The other stuffed pepper to know is pulneni chushki, filled with rice and minced meat and baked, whose meatless version goes on the Christmas Eve table.

17. Mish-mash

Mish-mash is tomatoes, peppers and onions stewed down and thickened with eggs and crumbled sirene, and it is served warm with fresh bread as a starter or a light main. Parsley goes over the top.

It is a spring dish, made when the first peppers arrive, and roasting and peeling them first rather than cutting them in raw changes the taste noticeably.

18. Lyutenitsa

Lyutenitsa is a relish of peppers and tomatoes cooked down with carrots, garlic and oil, often with aubergine and walnut, and it is served spread on bread or beside grilled meat. The name comes from the word for spicy, though most jars are mild.

It comes smooth or chunky, hot or sweet, and every Bulgarian family has an opinion about which is correct. Peppers matter enough that Bulgarian kitchens keep a dedicated appliance for them, the chushkopek or pepper roaster. Eat lyutenitsa on bread, with white cheese crumbled over the top, at any hour.

Kyopolou, katak and sharena sol

Three more things belong on the same piece of bread as lyutenitsa.

• Kyopolou: roasted aubergine and bell peppers mashed with parsley and garlic, served cold as a spread.
• Katak: a thick spread of strained yogurt or soft cheese with garlic and herbs, sharper than snezhanka.
• Sharena sol: salt mixed with ground sweet red pepper and summer savory, dipped into with buttered bread and used at the table in place of salt and pepper.

19. Mekitsi

Mekitsi are rounds of yogurt-enriched dough deep-fried until they puff, and they are served hot for breakfast with icing sugar, jam, honey, sirene or a bowl of yogurt. The name comes from the Slavic root mek, soft, which is exactly what they are in the middle.

They do not keep, so eat them where they are made. Sofia has counters that sell nothing else, and a mekitsa with sirene and a glass of ayran is the most Bulgarian breakfast available.

20. Garash cake (torta Garash)

Garash cake is a flourless chocolate cake of thin layers made from ground walnuts, egg whites and sugar under a chocolate ganache, and it is served by the slice with coffee. It contains no wheat flour at all, which makes it one of the few classic European cakes a coeliac visitor can eat.

It is named for the Austro-Hungarian confectioner Kosta Garash, who made it in the Danube city of Ruse, and it is dense, dark and far less sweet than the syrup-soaked desserts around it on a Bulgarian menu.

More Bulgarian food worth trying

Listed below are nine more Bulgarian specialities worth ordering if you see them, each with what it is and where it comes from.

• Patatnik: grated potato and onion seasoned with a mild local mint and cooked slowly into a cake, characteristic of the Rhodope Mountains.
• Parlenka: flat barbecue bread, scorched at the edges, often with herbs or garlic in it. It keeps, so ours travelled with us for two days.
• Gevrek: a soft white ring bread with an oversized hole, bought from a street counter as a snack.
• Kachamak: Bulgarian cornmeal, comparable to polenta, always eaten with sirene.
• Princesi: open-faced baked sandwiches topped with minced meat, yellow cheese, or egg and sirene.
• Katino meze: a hot starter of chopped pork, onion and mushrooms cooked with butter and spices.
• Banski starets, elenski but, pastarma and sujuk: the cured meats that fill out a meze board beside the lukanka.
• Kozunak: a rich sweet bread of milk, eggs, butter, sugar and lemon zest, baked for Easter.
• Baklava: layered pastry soaked in syrup, inherited from Ottoman cuisine and made here with walnuts.

What to drink in Bulgaria

The four drinks to order in Bulgaria are rakia, Bulgarian wine, Bulgarian beer and boza, and the first of them arrives before the food does.

Rakia

Rakia is a fruit brandy distilled from fermented plums, grapes, apricots, pears, cherries or raspberries, and it is served in a small glass at the start of a meal, alongside the salad rather than after it. Commercial rakia is normally around 40% alcohol; home-distilled rakia commonly runs from 50% to 80%, and someone will offer you some.

Bulgarian names follow the fruit: slivovitsa from plums, kaysieva from apricots, grozdova from grapes, and gyulova rakia from the roses of the valley around Kazanlak. Twelve Bulgarian rakia denominations carry protected-origin marks in the European Union. Its origin is contested: Bulgarian archaeologists have found an 11th-century fragment of a distillation vessel that some historians read as evidence rakia began here, while the earliest surviving written record sits in a 14th-century Serbian source. Sofia holds a Rakia and Spirits Fest in early December.

Bulgarian wine and beer

Bulgarian wine is worth ordering by grape rather than by label, and the varieties to look for are the local ones: Mavrud and Rubin for dark reds, Melnik from the far southwest, and Dimyat, Misket and Tamyanka for the aromatic whites. Bulgarian beer is mostly pale lager, and the names on the taps are Kamenitza, Zagorka, Shumensko and Pirinsko.

Boza

Boza is a thick fermented grain drink of about 1% alcohol with a sweet and slightly sour taste, and it is drunk cold, most often with a banitsa at breakfast. It divides visitors completely, so try it once in the morning with pastry, which is the only context in which it makes sense.

What Bulgarians eat on the holidays

Bulgarian holiday food follows a fixed calendar, and four dates account for most of it.

Christmas Eve (Budni vecher) is meatless, and the table carries an odd number of lenten dishes. Seven or nine is the count most often cited, twelve also circulates, and the rule that matters is that the number is odd. Sarmi, bob chorba, stuffed peppers, boiled wheat, nuts and dried fruit are the usual dishes, with three ritual breads, the important one being the bogovitsa, God’s bread, which has a coin baked into it.

New Year’s Eve is when the banitsa gets its fortunes. Nikulden, St Nicholas’ day on 6 December, is a fish day, usually carp, and Gergyovden, St George’s day on 6 May, is celebrated with roast lamb.

Where to eat Bulgarian food in Bulgaria

The places to eat Bulgarian food are the mehana, the traditional tavern, and the market halls, and Sofia has both within walking distance of each other. A mehana serves the grilled meat, the clay-pot dishes and the salads, usually with music; the markets hold the cheese, the lukanka and the lyutenitsa. Food is inexpensive here by western European standards, which is why I ordered three courses most nights when I would normally have had one. To eat a lot of it quickly and have someone explain it, consider going on this food tour of Sofia, which covers several traditional Bulgarian dishes in one afternoon.

Bulgaria also rewards moving around, because much of this food is regional: patatnik in the Rhodopes, lukanka around Panagyurishte and Karlovo, Garash cake in Ruse, Melnik wine in the southwest. Flights into Sofia and Varna are worth comparing on Trip.com for Bulgaria, coaches between the food towns run with Flixbus in Bulgaria, and the village guesthouses where the home cooking happens are on Booking.com for Bulgaria. For the rest of the trip, our guide to Bulgaria covers the practicalities, and there are more interesting facts about Bulgaria if you want the context first.

Cook Bulgarian food at home

Most of these dishes travel well to a home kitchen, because the ingredient lists are short and the only hard-to-source item is the cheese. Banitsa, tarator, shopska salad, lyutenitsa, mish-mash and mekitsi all work with supermarket filo and yogurt and feta standing in for sirene. For the method on each, this cookbook covers the classics, and this Bulgarian recipe book is the one to pick if you are cooking without meat.

Bulgarian food FAQ

The questions travellers ask most often about Bulgarian food are answered below, each in one sentence.

What is traditional Bulgarian food?

Traditional Bulgarian food is a Balkan cuisine built on white brined cheese and sour yogurt, fresh and roasted peppers, grilled minced meat and slow stews baked in earthenware pots, with a strong Ottoman inheritance.

What is the most eaten food in Bulgaria?

Bread, yogurt and sirene appear at more Bulgarian meals than anything else, and among named dishes banitsa and shopska salad are the two a visitor will be offered most often.

What is the national dish of Bulgaria?

Shopska salad is the dish most commonly described as Bulgaria’s national dish, although it was created by the state tourism organisation in 1956 rather than inherited from village cooking.

What do they eat for breakfast in Bulgaria?

A Bulgarian breakfast is banitsa or mekitsi with a glass of ayran or boza, and mish-mash or eggs with sirene when it is a sit-down meal.

What alcohol do they drink in Bulgaria?

Bulgarians drink rakia, a fruit brandy of around 40% alcohol served before the meal, along with local wines from Mavrud, Melnik and Dimyat grapes and pale lagers such as Kamenitza and Zagorka.

What is Bulgarian street food?

Bulgarian street food is banitsa and mekitsi from a morning counter, gevrek rings, princesi open sandwiches, and grilled kebapche and kyufte in the afternoon and evening.

Is Bulgarian food good for vegetarians?

Bulgarian food suits vegetarians better than its reputation suggests: shopska salad, snezhanka, tarator, bob chorba, banitsa, mish-mash, chushki byurek, kachamak, lyutenitsa and vegetable gyuvech are all meatless, and the lenten Christmas Eve tradition means every Bulgarian kitchen knows how to cook without meat.

Is Bulgarian yogurt really different from other yogurt?

Bulgarian yogurt is legally different: the name kiselo mlyako is reserved by Bulgarian law for milk fermented with Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus alone, with no additives, and the European Commission registered the name as a protected designation in July 2023.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 5 tips below come from eating across Bulgaria from Sofia to the villages near Bozhentsi, and from checking the dish histories that other food guides repeat wrongly.

1. Ask a village guesthouse whether they cook dinner, and book it when you book the room. The couple who ran the guesthouse outside Bozhentsi grew their own vegetables, kept cows and goats for milk and baked their own bread, and the meal they put on the table beat anything I paid for in a restaurant. Small guesthouses rarely advertise the kitchen, so ask in advance rather than on the day.
2. Expect the rakia before the food, not after it. Bulgarians drink it alongside the salad at the start of a meal, so a glass arrives while you are still reading the menu. Commercial bottles sit around 40% alcohol, while the home-distilled rakia somebody will offer you commonly runs 50% to 80%, which is worth knowing before you accept a second one.
3. Ignore the shopska salad flag story, and do not credit the Soviets either. Balkantourist, Bulgaria’s own state tourism organisation, named the salad in 1956 and first served it at the Chernomorets restaurant in Druzhba near Varna. The resemblance of the white, green and red to the flag is recorded as a coincidence embraced afterwards, not a design brief.
4. Order shkembe chorba hot, whatever the guidebook says. Several guides describe it as a cold soup. It is tripe simmered for hours and served hot, and the garlic, vinegar and chilli go in at the table rather than in the kitchen.
5. Ask for the Bulgarian baklava by name. I ran out of patience looking for it and ate the Turkish kind instead, which is what most tourist counters sell. The Bulgarian version is made with walnuts, and a bakery will point you at it once you use the word.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-person notes in this post come from her trip through Bulgaria, from the guesthouse outside Bozhentsi to the mehana in Sofia where the fire dancer carried her over the embers. The team covers Bulgaria for independent travellers, including the food tours, guesthouses, mehanas and cookbooks worth the money, and updates this page when names, seasons and rules change.