During your stay in Slovenia, you have to taste some typical Slovene dishes. As you will see, the choice is big and most of the restaurants still offer home made food.
Where to eat?
When travelling around Slovenia, you will drive past many restaurants, called “gostilna’, that usually serve Slovene food. It is not always easy to choose the right one, so check for “Gostilna Slovenija”, a brand that guarantees Slovene typical and home made dishes. The restaurants with that title are situated all over the country, but you will not find them in the town centres.
If you want to taste some delicious home grown and home made food, you should look for tourist farms, that offer accommodation and meals.
In bigger towns you will find also many international restaurants, the most frequent are Italian and Chinese restaurants. But there are also Libanese, Japanese, Indian etc. There are also many snack bars offering fast food, especially famous Bosnian meat or cottage cheese “burek” and horse meat burgers.
If you like cooking, you have to visit the town food markets. Main Ljubljana market offers a wide selection of vegetables and fruit, but also dairy products, bread, meat, sausages, that are brought it every morning directly from the farms nearby. There is also a special section with eco products.
Another thing I really like are the milk vending machines with the fresh cow milk delivered daily from the local farms. The machines also sell empty reusable glass bottles.
What to eat?
In Slovenia we eat a lot of meat, especially pork, beef and poultry. It is more difficult to find lamb or rabbit meat or even deer meat. Slovenes also like potatoes and soups. Here is a list of some typical Slovene dishes, that you have to try during your stay:
– Kraski prsut, dried ham from the Karst region
– pumpkin oil (bucno olje), dark oil, used for all sorts of salads
– zlikrofi, specially shaped potate filled dumplings,
– sauté potatoes (restan krompir), boiled potatoes and fried with onions,
– Carniolan sausage (kranjska klobasa),
– struklji, dough filled with cottage cheese, wallnut, apple or poppy seeds,
– potica, a wallnut cake, eaten mostly for Christmas and Easter, but you can buy it in shops during the year as well,
– Prekmurska gibanica, typical desert form the Prekmurje region, with layers of wallnuts, cottage cheese and poppy seeds,
– cream cake (kremsnita), vanilla and sweet cream cake from Bled,
– apple strudel, known also in neighbouring countries.
Eating habits
- There are no set hours for lunch or dinner (except on Sunday).
- Slovenes eat their lunch in the late afternoon. Starting work at 8 am, many skip their lunch break and eat when they return back home. In that case they will eat a light dinner or a sandwich before going to bed.
- Meals are large and rich, most people eat a single dish with a salad for a main course.
- In Slovenia we eat the main dish at the same time as the salad.
- Soup is the most popular starter.
- Restaurants are open all day long and they serve food through the whole day.
- Slovene deserts are mostly very rich cakes.
You are welcome to share your experience about food in Slovenia. We would like to hear also your ideas and suggestions where to eat well.