It’s Not So Maribor-ing After All!

My trip to Slovenia was an official one – to do a survey research on the general art scene in Maribor and Ljubljana as part of an artist/curator exchange program between Green Papaya art projects and Pekarna Magdalenske Mreze. Our documentation of said program is on this blog  short circuit tactics 360 .

There you’ll also find some bits of gustatory adventure of my Slovenian counterpart Miha Horvat when he was in Manila last Nov 2009 as well as a particular entry about the oldest vine tree in the world .

the wine store at the city center right across the kojak landmark which sells mostly white wines

I’m writing here my Anthony Bourdain version of that trip, if I can still recall what I’ve been eating there.

For the most part, I was so keen on trying out the beers that they have . So each time me and my producer Marko would do grocery shopping at Merkator, their local grocery, I’ll be putting in the basket a bottle of each.

Those beers were –

7.6% downed with valium, down for a whole day, missed a meeting thereafter

czech beer, was drinking this while cooking beef with oyster sauce, full-bodied but not as dense, malty nice

this was clearly a mistake! it tasted like ginger ale, so carbonated, made me gassy

i know this was also quite good but somehow unremarkable

1st beer i had soon as i landed in Vienna, great at the first gulp as the flight from manila was 17 hours long. but after downing several of this, it started to feel like water

yippee! for Jeffe...... just mmmmmmmm....

Union dark ale - somewhere between Cerveza negra and Guinness, has that premium malty taste typical of dark ales but doesn't feel like a lump of brick in the tummy

The most popular brands there were the local brews Union and Lasko zragatova. The boys, the crew from Miha’s Werther  opera project preferred Union more than Laško as lasko is stronger and hence makes them become drunk faster than union.I  preferred lasko as it had a bolder taste yet not too overpowering and sweet like red horse beer, and because im a tippler who needs to stick to my booze budget.

Of course, as a tippler, I didn’t confine myself to just drinking beer, I had to have their locally distilled liquour, their own version of lambanog, but distilled with pears, or plums, or whatever fruit they have a surplus of. Curiously, those home distilled concoctions like viljamovka or slivovka or even the Serbian type, all tasted like our lambanog, only theirs is much more fragrant, it felt like drinking my mom’s perfume.  This really tide me over my first winter though it was almost at its tail end as I’ve been a mildly aghast  spectator of costumed locals

casually strolling the trg/ or the city center in  a sort of mardi gras to drive away winter and finally welcome spring.

more pictures here

I was lucky to get a good ones from the farmer’s market. One old fogey named Jakov who had a Pinay girlfriend when he was stationed in Makati some years ago, even offered to give me his own produced pumpkin seed oil. Pumpkin seed oil is what they used mostly for their salads instead of olive oil, and it actually taste better, nutty and less acidic than olive oil. This I learned when Marko took me to a traditional Slovene dinner on a roadside restaurant on the way to Ljubljana. He was admonishing me for not choosing the pumpkin seed oil dressing. There I had chicken that closely resemble chicken parmigiana. This was paired with rolled dough with potatoes which was similar to gnocchi which I found as too starchy,glutenous, bland, and felt like I was eating play do or one of my food landscape maquettes.

from my Terrible Landscape series, imagine your food tasting like this - an abstract mush of mulchy starch and the unnameable left-overs freezing for weeks in the corner of the fridge

It’s awful. I preferred the roasted potatoes and pork loin on Marko’s plate.

Maribor was such a placid town.

this is maribor.postcard pretty view

My first weekend was a plunge into a deep awful stillness.  All the shops at the city center were closed. I was humming myself to dreamless wakeless sleeping with the Hungarian suicide song/White Sunday. To counter that, I decided to cook chicken pork adobo using what was in Marko’s pantry since he hardly cooks, such as this dark soya sauce and cider-like vinegar; the meat, bay leaf, and  garlic all came from Merkator, again. The resulting adobo was sufficiently sanity appeasing, and went well with  the beer.

chicken pork adobo on a gloomy suicide-inducing sunday

the condiments used in said adobo

Another time I cooked corn tortilla tomato soup which I’ve always been making back in Manila which I tried to make in Maribor as a token  for Miha and Metka for helping me with my laundry. I was just wandering inside a Merkator branch and was just looking around when I thought of making that soup. I thought all the ingredients that I needed were there but it was hard to decipher the labels since I couldn’t understand much Slovene. I bought what I thought were bay leaves but were actually dried whole basil leaves, the cumin was something else, and celery was substituted by leeks. Seeing no tortilla chips, I opted for the dried bread sitting on the counter for days to thicken the soup.  Was it out of sheer boredom again that I made the soup with manually scalded and peeled tomatoes bought from the fruit and veggie vendor from across the train station along Partizanska cesta, and the chicken stock from actually boiling the chicken? It was just out of sheer necessity as canned tomatoes and bouillon cubes seem unheard of in Merkator. But the whole pot lasted for a week, the rest of the shredded chicken went into a bead spread with dill, mayo and pickles.

An afternoon of looking at the ducks on the lake made me crave for rice and something Chinese. Aiming for a peking duck rice topping supper I walked up to their only mall Europark and scoured the aisles for the requisites of that palate longing only to end up with a dismal basket of oyster sauce, a broccoli head and a ½ kilo of beef strip loin.

There were a couple of Chinese restaurants in Maribor but the locals were strictly warning me not to eat there. It didn’t taste very Chinese at all since they probably just used mixes from the grocery. When they do have a craving to eat Asian food, they endure the 4 hour road trip or train ride to Vienna to buy instant noodles and dumplings and fish sauce which Marko and friends had in the trunk of his car when they picked me up from the airport in Vienna. One of the bottles of fish sauce even broke and reeked in the Vienna airport parking lot. But hey there’s a business opportunity there, hoarding Mama Sita mixes and Lee Kum Kee chilli pastes and Nissin instant noodles to sell at black market price to these Asian food crazed Slovenes.

A girl I met at Miha Viputnik’s retro screening/dinner at Kulturni inkubator reasons out that since Asian food, being generally spicy, doesn’t suit  their digestive system so these restaurants tend to tame it down with the spices resulting in a rather dull approximation of it.

That night, Viputnik cooked while he screened his videos. He started off with a Lebanese course of chicken and couscous and hummus with pita bread.  The second course was a Thai Californian fusion spread  with noodle salad with melon and carrots and broccoli, spicy chicken, jasmine rice, and lots of beer. He is originally from Maribor but spent 12 years in the States under a Fullbright scholarship then taught thereafter in a film school. I asked him if he preferred cooking now rather than making videos. He said, he just wants to eat well that’s why he cooks. But I presume he’s spending more time in the kitchen than in the editing room.

video artist Miha Viptunik

the thai california salad - a colorful mix of broccoli, zucchini, sweet melon, chicken and rice noodles

One time Marko prepared miso soup for lunch. That’s just about the cooking he does in his compact but functioning kitchen, aside from heating up the left overs he gets from their farm house or sometimes brought over by his mom.  Interestingly, that’s what I also do when I used to have my own studio – get food from my parents’ house if I’m too busy to cook or just want to save up. By way of those packed left-overs I got a sampling of home cooking courtesy of Marko’s mom. I had blood sausage, pork sausage, a lot of sauerkraut, lasagna, the rolled potato dough again, a sort of streusel which was really delightful and incomparable to the ones being sold in the Pekarna (how they call their bakery) across Marko’s place, and this potato onion pancake-like quiche.

One Sunday, Marko took me to their farm house for lunch and met his parents who were really nice and congenial and quite funny particularly his dad. Lunch was started off with a tasting of their own wine. The red is quite sour and tastes more like juice. The white was a bit better as being more wine-like. We started the meal with salad and beef soup with shredded pancakes that looked like noodles. This tasted so much like our beef nilaga. Main course rolled in with fried chicken, finger licking roasted rack of pork ribs, and potato onion quiche-like pancake. For dessert we had a sort of prune cake that would’ve went well with coffee, but I was having too much wine, again.

the lunch spread

a barrel from the cellar

a stock champagne bottles, presents from friends, all unopened yet

The blood sausage was the one that really stuck to my palate – spicy-sour, with a slight liver-like bitterness, buttery smooth texture intermingled with the small  bulgur grains –  it was very robust, potent, it’s something you’d want to gulp dark ales with such as Guinness which is really a breakfast beer. Marko said farmers used to eat that for breakfast that’s why it’s that savory and dense. The pigs used to make such sausage from are only slaughtered during winter so the blood would congeal. Some of the blood end up as sliced blood cakes, others are used for the sausage combined with spices and barley wheat or rice.  It looked like a giant black penis so I was at first hesitant to try it but it was surprisingly enjoyable.

wood used to press the grapes for the wine

the vegetable patch protected from frost by glass sheets

view of the farm from the beehouse

Miha took me to a gostilna for lunch where  I had grilled trout and fries. The service was so slow I was compelled to get a beer, again Laško, a sensible move cued in by Miro, Miha’s friend with whom he was working on a film project. The food was as Miro put it, not good not bad, but it was free or rather was on the tab of the expense account of their project’s producer so I’d say not bad at all.

Miro took me to a bureck place for breakfast. Bureck is like a flaky pie filled in with either spinach, cheese or ground meat and kneaded in elongated 8-12 inches sized rolls. It Looks deceptively light because of its shape but it’s rather compactly richly savory, it can pass off as a satisfying budget brunch. I had one of each with sour milk that’s similar to lassi. Miro said that’s the usual accompaniment  but I wasn’t able to finish mine especially the sour milk which didn’t mesh well with my morning tummy as it sent me on an urgent trip to the toilet.

Bureck is as common as the kebabs. These are great meal buys since they’re satisfying but very cheap and are widely available in train stations, on the streets of Maribor and Ljubljana. But of course Mcdonald’s is cheaper but why would I eat there?

Ceramic artist Iztok, clothes designer Mira and independent curator Petra, took me to a Serbian place by the river for lunch and for me to try cevapčiči which is grilled minced meat and a common staple of Balkan cuisine. This is usually served with flat bread like keema and kebab with chopped onions, sour cream and cottage cheese.  And man, good thing Im not vegetarian anymore. It was all meat, meat, meat, – minced, chopped, in sausage form and all grilled. But what I really liked there was the cheese called kajmak, it’s so velvety smooth like butter, I’m still smacking my lips just reminiscing over it. But the meat was just too much. Mira thinks she’s eaten her ratio of meat for the month. We all wanted to sleep after while rubbing our full tummies, plus the fact that we had shots of the viljamovka that Mira’s father made before going there for lunch. The serving of baklava didn’t help eradicate the lingering meaty taste on the tongue,  for it wasn’t as sweet as the greek version.

Since Slovenia is bordered also by Italy by way of Trieste, Maribor and Ljubljana would naturally have its share of quaint pizzerias, even in a remote small town such as Lenart where we had pizzas after being entranced by the UV fluorescent lit network of nylon strings installed by Nina Sulin in a small church there. But wherever you are in Slovenia their pizzas come in only one size – 28 inches and typically that’s one serving, which to me is more like a serving for 4. I had a slice of “breakfast” pizza that was topped with bacon and eggs, and a taco-flavored pizza that’s smothered in melted cheddar cheese.

the "breakfast" pizza

We paired our pizzas with a drink which I think is unique in Slovenia but which the French would consider a great sacrilege for it was coke mixed with red wine. But the fuck with all that purist sommelier snobbery, this was the perfect drink with pizza.

I thought someone would order the Balkan pizza which was composed of a slice of tomato and a large round patty of minced meat. It really looked weird we’re laughing our sinuses off at how it was pictured in the menu.

that infamous Balkan pizza on the menu listing

In an Italian-themed restaurant in Ljubljana, I got a visual tip on how to finish a 28inch-sized pizza from a couple on a date where the girl was just eating the center leaving the whole crust out looking like a perfectly-formed steering wheel made out of dough. That was helpful but I still wasn’t that hungry enough to be devouring one pizza by myself.  Instead I opted for a 4 cheese ravioli with gorgonzola sauce with their home brewed beer.  It was so creamy and yeasty I kept wondering why I ordered this but I gulped down all of it being so hungry and cold and wet as it was raining the night I got there.

The meal I had in a traditional Slovene restaurant called Sokol (still in Ljubljana) was better. Petja an independent curator from Lljubljana said, it’s easy to spot a good traditional Slovene restaurant if it has a statue of a chef outside the door. And that’s how I spotted Sokol  where I had veal stew with homebaked bread and red wine. Veal is a wonderful revelation, it ‘s so tender it’s really suitable for slow cooking.  The waiter brought the veal stew in a small iron pot and was kept hanging over a small candle burner to ensure that the stew will be hot all throughout my meal.

the veal stew from sokol

I developed a certain habit for the three weeks I was in Maribor – hanging out in  Cajek  tea shop in the city center and having my Irish coffee fix.  Their Irish coffee comes with a small bar of dark chocolate and none of that whipped cream froth that Starbucks ejaculates on every order of café latte.

irish kava

Kava, coffee in Slovene, has now become synonymous to Irish coffee for me that wherever I went, even if wasn’t part of their menu, I’d still order it which I did when I first meet up with Petra and Iztok in Huda Kava. Their barista wasn’t sure how it was made and asked me instead what whiskey I’d prefer for my irish, of course Jameson, what else, even if they have a considerably wide variety of liquor and whiskeys in their counter shelf. Gawd, im such an alcoholic, I even put whiskey in my milk.

Maybe that’s why I felt so at home in Maribor for just the three weeks I’ve been there. The pivos, whiskeys, vodkas and viljamovkas are all just within reach and there’s so many to choose from. With people being generally and genuinely convivial, and not to shy away from sharing a drink with aliens like me, provided you don’t crack tirades about politics and religion, a definite no-no in any drinking party,  and a national anthem that doubles as a toasting song (titled Zdravljica) for overcoming all the toil and tussle of the past, always finding an occasion to drink and be thankful for.

Cheers to that or rather Naz dravje!