“LOO-BLAH-NAH, SLOH-VEEN-EE-UH”
According to the Visit Ljubljana tourism website, in 2024, “a total of 2,590,898 overnight stays were recorded, marking a 12.7% increase compared to the previous year.” In a city of less than 300,000 people, that’s a fair amount. Visitors from Italy, Germany, and the US crown the list, but walking around town you can also hear tour groups speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese as well. Ljubljana is a certified international, instagrammable destination. There’s a castle, a market, a bridge with dragons on it. It is quaint.
When researching this piece I also found that the city was voted Best European Destination of 2022, as well as Best European City for Short Breaks in 2023 and 2024. Who exactly voted for these distinctions?
The titles come from the European Best Destinations Dot Com, which started in 2009 and hands out awards based on web traffic. I mean, okay, sure, yes. I find these types of lists a little stupid, but mostly benign, until I start thinking about all the ways tourism affects a city. It’s an age old tale I don’t need to get into, city governments scramble for tourism dollars, city residents pray tourists will fuck off and die.
I’m not a tourist per se but I did just move to Ljubljana, inexplicably. I didn’t have a reason to come except that I heard it was great and it’s part of the European Economic Area, so I could. I am not great at languages, but I do try to integrate. Vampi is the first word I learned in Slovene. It means tripe. Go figure. As soon as I got to Ljubljana, I was trying to track it down, which proved harder than I thought.
Before Ljubljana, my entire experience of Balkan cuisine has been in Belgrade, a city that values off-cuts and often places them at the center of menus. I thought Ljubljana would be similar. It wasn’t. I quickly learned that the rest of the Balkan countries don’t always view Slovenia as part of the region. Yes it was part of Yugoslavia, it was also the first country to leave and the first to join the EU. The Austro-Hungarian influence is strong here. Slovenia also has its own language, as opposed to the common tongue Croatians, Bosnians, Serbians and Montenegrans share. Less charitably, Slovenes are what my Bosnian girlfriend calls, stuck-up, self-loathing, pseudo-Austrian, fake-ass Germans.
Geo-politics aside, the food is just a little different in Ljubljana.
Vampi (tripe) is for grandmothers, is what people told me. I was mostly asking younger Slovenes, but my landlord, a grandmother herself, confirmed it. She loves vampi. Cooks it all the time. There is of course a loyal following to the culinary tradition of cooking ruminant stomachs. GUTS exists because of that following. But looking at restaurant menus in downtown Ljubljana, you would be hard-pressed to locate it. Outside of pan-fried liver and onions and the occasional Trieste-style tripe, most restaurants are not serving up much offal. With tourist dollars comes tourist appetites and the flattening of palettes. That, apparently, results in mediocre smash burgers, the fucking trend to end all trends all over Europe. I can’t blame the tourists for everything, but I will certainly try.
So, here it is, “Where to Eat Guts in Ljubljana”. It’s limited to places I’ve eaten at and surely has blind spots. I hope it feeds you.
I also hope it makes you wonder why this offal thing that is so often labelled the food of the poor, has now become a little out of reach? You have to really go out of your way and look for it. If you plotted the restaurants I write about here on a map of the city, it would be easy to see what they all have in common.
None of them are in the tourist zone.
Žmoht – Zaloška cesta 55, 1000 Ljubljana
Žmoht is a weekday lunch spot, found in the Moste Market area of the city. You might remember it from the interview I did with it’s founder and chef, Dado Novaković, back in January. It is a mainstay of my diet here in Ljubljana. Every morning I check instagram to see what Dado is serving up that day. Most recently I had an amazing risotto with asparagus and trout that Dalibor smoked himself, but I’ve also eaten fabulous tripe and liver there. Whatever he’s cooking, I’m eating.
TaBar – Trubarjeva cesta 72, 1000 Ljubljana
This is one of the few restaurants I had actually heard about before coming to Ljubljana. The chef, Jakob Pintar, works wonders with seasonal ingredients and wild game he hunts and guts himself. It is easy to tell from the menu that he is a lover of all things offal, which immediately drew me to the place. I haven’t tried the tasting menu (yet) but the lunches I’ve eaten here have all left me with a little more hope in humanity. Lung ragu and fried head cheese are among the spectacular dishes I’ve eaten at TaBar, but again, I’ve never eaten anything less than great. They also have a fantastic Slovenian natural wine list. It’s a place with such a strong culinary perspective I can’t help but respect and devour it.
Gostilna “Pri Stričku” – Kodrova ulica 8, 1000 Ljubljana
This is a lunch restaurant on the edge of town, that is only open Monday-Friday. It’s always packed for good reason. A family run place, it’s in it’s second generation of making traditional Slovenian dishes the long way. I fuck with this place heavy, the long way, etc. They’re known for their homemade blood sausages but I’ve never eaten a bad dish. The first time I visited I asked for every type of offal they had, and they did not disappoint. Fried sweetbreads, liver and onions, tripe, and scrambled brains all came to our table. The dish I get every time is the thinly cut veal tongue salad. It’s the perfect way to start a meal.
Beli Labod 2（白天鹅餐厅） – Jurčkova Cesta 7, 1000 Ljubljana
The White Swan Number Two is the further afield offshoot of a central Ljubljana Chinese joint that has saved my ass on numerous occasions. I love trying Chinese food outside of China, which, depending on the local palette and diaspora community can range from bland to transporting. I hate using the word authentic to describe food, so I wont, but the food here stands up to things I used to eat in mainland PRC. The tour buses dropping off groups of Chinese tourists outside buoys that. The menu itself doesn’t list any offal but if you ask politely the chef will make you pig tripe and peppers or mao xue wang, a delicious Sichuan stew of congealed blood and other organs.
