Cheap Eats - Bridge to Bosnia

Neretva

War makes strange bedfellows. Something always remains behind on the battlefield. Once clashing cultures share clean-up duty, they invariably sample each others K rations. Foods have a way of surviving to mutate and thrive in revolution’s forced evolution.

Which goes to show the only good thing to come of war is interesting eats. Maybe no other area exemplifies this better than Bosnia, which has morphed due to generations of wars of religion and race. Now with newly defined land, there is also a loosely defined cuisine that straddles all Bosnians’ once-conflicting cultures.

Marietta Market: It’s a food fallout that works at Neretva, a market and accompanying cafe in Marietta. The combo provides a virtual museum of canned and cooked exhibits from Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East. The restaurant and market is owned by the “Family Starcevic,” a Slovenian father and Americanized daughter. The Old World market is overseen by the friendly but coolly disinterested daughter. It seems Dad’s more involved with the newer cafe that adjoins the store. The businesses’ moniker, Neretva, honors a river that runs through Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia. A modest-scale model of Neretva’s bridge, a monument allegedly built without a single nail, adorns the modest eatery. The “Stari Most” bridge was destroyed by shelling during the war in 1993. It still serves as a metaphor for land torn asunder by the very cultures that made it unique. Pieces of this bridge were dug from the river and used to rebuild a new Stari Most in 2004.

Mismatch menagerie: The market’s shelves are randomly stocked with retro-packaged keks for kids, coffees and teas with names such as “regulating prostate perfection brew.” Beside the modest Eastern European packaging of condiments are arrogant German Senfs (mustards). There are Hungarian nectars and decorative carafes full of hand-crimped sugar cubes. Bulgarian sausages, salamis and unlabeled soupy cheeses fill the small and somewhat nebulous refrigerated cases. You can also find patés in plastic made of mystery meats. Somehow, it’s awfully refreshing to know there’s an East European version of Spam. There are also the lazy cooks’ packages of goulash helper. Just add the ghoul.

So Meaty: The entrees at the cafe successfully (albeit a bit too singularly) focus on grilled-meat dishes of pork and beef, typically small sausages called cevapcici or Bosnian burgers called pljeskavica served in plentiful amounts with homemade bread, an unremarkable side salad and two typical condiments: a mixture of ricotta, cottage and creamed cheese and ajvar, a relish made from paprika and vegetables. The portions are huge and quite affordable, averaging around $6 per entree.

We were the only eaters in the restaurant; natives sipped coffees and kefirs outside. For the sake of the business, one would hope the menu might expand to include East European pastries to appeal to the coffee klatches. The meat-and-simple-salad theme might also gain more aesthetic appeal if dished up with some sort of vegetable or even an overcooked starchy thing to serve as a frame for the mounds of flesh on the plate. But maybe I’m the peasant who overlooks the bounty of a full plate.