Sarajevo Restaurant: Come for the Food, Stay for the Color

When you frequent only the fanciest restaurants, you get used to making reservations.  Luckily for us (us = Neil), we usually don't frequent the fancy places and most of the places we've checked out so far haven't had much of a wait.  That's one of the reasons we were surprised when we showed up at Restaurant Sarajevo on a Friday night and were told that there was no room at the inn.  We wandered off disappointed, but we gave it a try the the next Friday (making a reservation well in advance) and got ready to check off our first former Yugoslav republic off of the list.  Bosnian cuisine, here we come!

Drinks
One of the best features of trying different ethnic restaurants in Chicago is bringing your own booze, which is a feature of lots of the restaurants we've been trying.  For dinner, Beth picked out a nice organic zinfandel, a big red wine whose grape hails from roughly the same region as Bosnia.  At $10 from Binny's, this is a great way to eat and keep the check reasonable.  Also, the restaurant didn't charge a corkage fee.

Food
We weren't sure what to expect from Bosnian cuisine (we're too lazy to do advance research), and despite the names looking a little different, we recognized some of our favorites from various other restaurants from that part of Europe.  We were hungry, so we wasted no time digging in when our waiter brought us some delicious bread and olive oil.  It was homemade, slightly dense and had a pleasant chew.  We were off to a good start!

Olive Oil with Garlic & Herbs

For our appetizer, we started with a cold plate.  It had three meats: a smoked beef and two kinds of Bosnian sausage (also beef).  Each had a distinctive flavor--one with strong peppery notes and the other with garlic. Beth briefly considered the idea of making this her daily lunch. Our host later told us that all of them were made in Wisconsin since he couldn't make it in Illinois, due to apparently large amounts of government red tape.  They rounded out the cold plate with some roasted red peppers and a Bosnian feta cheese from Travnik, which is a city in Bosnia and makes a fine feta.

Cold Appetizer Plate

 For our entrees, Beth had the chicken medallions.  The pounded breast meat was served with mushrooms and a light sauce over rounds of bread.   They came with a side of vegetables (oddly, some were boiled and others roasted).

Chicken Medallions

Neil wanted to have one of everything, so he went with the Bosnian Mix Plate.  It started with grilled veal and chicken kabobs and rounded out with three sausages, a beef sausage, cevapcici (skinless sausage), and pljeskavica (a sort of hamburger made with pork, lamb and beef).  Throw on some rice and veggies, and he got Restaurant Sarajevo's tour of Bosnian cuisine. The grilled meats were good, but the sausages were the highlight.  Tasty stuff!

Bosnian Mix Plate

Dessert was the highlight of the meal according to Neil (Beth really liked the sausage plate appetizer).  It was prepared table side by the chef/host on a mobile cart complete with burner.  He mixed white wine (poured from a re-purposed juice bottle), egg, and sugar over heat in a large copper bowl, beat it steadily and soon it turned into a frothy, light sauce that he served over crepes.  It was a great way to end the meal.

Overall
The food at Restaurant Sarajevo is good home cooking, but the highlight is the color.  The owner/chef is quite a character and truly serves as the host for the evening.  During our time there, he made it to every table in the restaurant, and chatted with all the guests.  Half way through our dinner, he took advantage of the empty chair at our table to come over and talk to us.  We learned that the waiter is his son and his wife and daughter were working in the kitchen.  He told us about the smoked sausages he has made in Wisconsin, how he actually learned to cook in Croatia (hence many similarities to a Croatian restaurant that I suspect you'll hear more about over the course of this blog), and how he likes to cheer up customers who are experiencing a bad date at his restaurant.  This guy gets our vote for host of the year.

Foreign Factor
6 out of 10  Sarajevo Restaurant is very accessible to those not versed in Bosnian cuisine, but definitely has the feel of the old world.  Several tables of guests were obviously from the old country and Bosnian (or whatever language they were speaking) could heard both in the front and back of the house.  The restaurant has a nice feel but retains an old world charm that gives it some great color.  The menu is very approachable and includes photos.

What We Learned
While they may not like each other very much, the former Yugoslav republics are close enough that the cuisine definitely has the same feel, mixing Mediterranean influences with the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  Beth was surprised that there was no pork in any of the sausages on the appetizer plate, but apparently all beef sausage is a Bosnian trademark.  We learned that modern Chicago frowns upon people smoking their own meat and making their own sausage.  So much for Beth pursing that as a hobby.  We also learned that while food is normally the star, the color can also make a meal!

More
Bosnian is so great that it's actually two countries in one, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Read more:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina