Eating in Tirana

Fërgesë Tirane

It carries Tirana’s name and heads any order: peppers and tomato sautéed with curd cheese, cooked in a clay dish until it bubbles, and served in it, scalding, to scoop up with bread. There’s a version with veal liver and one without, vegetables only.

It’s simple, it’s substantial and it tastes like nothing in the country next door: it’s from here. It’s ordered as a starter to share, though with bread it can be the whole meal.

If you try one dish in Tirana, this one.

Tavë kosi

Albania’s national dish and an idea that sounds odd and works: lamb baked under a mixture of yoghurt and egg that sets on top like a savoury custard, browned. It’s served in the dish and eaten with a spoon.

It’s Ottoman in origin and Albania made it its own.

It’s heavy, so it’s a lunch dish rather than dinner, and it’s one of those things to try even if the description doesn’t sell it: the sharpness of the yoghurt against the lamb is exactly what you don’t expect.

Byrek and the street food

Byrek gets eaten every day: paper-thin layers of pastry filled with cheese, spinach, meat or pumpkin, baked in a tray and sold by the slice in places that do nothing else. It’s breakfast, quick lunch and hangover cure. It costs practically nothing and it’s everywhere. Alongside byrek, qofte, long grilled meatballs, and suflaqe complete the eating-standing-up chapter. In an already cheap city, this is the bottom rung and it’s good.

Coffee, which here is a religion

The counts that circulate put Albania first in the world for coffee bars per inhabitant, ahead of Spain and Italy. Walking around Tirana you believe it easily: there’s one every twenty metres and they’re full mid-morning on a Tuesday.

And there’s a reason. In a country that came out of a dictatorship which banned free assembly, with high unemployment and low wages, the café is where life happens: deals, flirting, politics, and an afternoon spent over a cup that costs very little.

Sit in one and order an espresso (the coffee here is good, an Italian inheritance) and you’ll be doing the most Albanian thing available.

The raki, and the Pazari i Ri

Albanian raki, a spirit usually from grapes and almost always homemade, is what will be put in front of you the moment you sit down in someone’s house. It’s drunk at any hour, even with breakfast in the villages, and the good stuff is what someone makes at home, not the labelled bottle.

To see it all at once, the Pazari i Ri: the city market, refurbished a few years ago, with fruit, vegetable, cheese and meat stalls around it and restaurants on the square.

It’s where Tirana shops and where you eat best without hunting. It’s the obligatory stop if you care about food and not tablecloths.