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I recently had the best pickles of my life, in Romania. This makes sense once you realize how much the country loves the briny treats. “We eat a lot of pickles as a nation—because we drink a lot,” Alexandra Blas, owner of the Bucharest restaurant (appropriately named) Pickles, told me.
She serves pickles on grilled cheese sandwiches and fried pickles with a creamy herb sauce; jars of pickles she made to sell line one wall. But what blew me away was the lemon kimchi.
Blas was inspired to make kimchi when a number of Asian restaurants started opening in Bucharest a couple of years ago. “That’s when I realized I could probably ferment anything,” she said. She started pickling quince, beets, red cabbage, and even ketchup, all with the spicy gochugaru (chili flakes) that’s essential for the Korean staple dish. She’s also experimented with small batches of kimchi sour beer.
It makes sense that a country with a strong love of fermented food would so fully embrace kimchi. Both techniques are ancient ways of preserving food, but modern globalization enables chefs to swap ingredients easily and try new combinations. I’ve always loved flavors that kick you in the mouth (I used to bite into raw lemons as a kid), so adding citrus to vinegar and hot spice is a zingy dance for my taste buds.
I didn’t manage to book a table at Soro Lume, which is supposed to be the city’s best example of contemporary Romanian food (and happens to have pickled onions and cauliflower on the menu). But I luckily was able to continue my fermented journey at Papila, a modern bistro that serves pigeon breast with house-made kimchi sauces and ferments cucumbers with garlic and honey. I was served small plates of pickled wood ear mushrooms and eggplant, as well as pickled Chinese cabbage and radishes in ramen, available only on Sundays. In the evening, I sampled kombucha-like sours at Anagram Brewing and even snagged a cocktail made with fortified pickled grape juice at Fix Me a Drink.
Of course there’s so much more to Romania than pickles (like mountains and castles and edgy post-Soviet culture). But the sour flavor seems right for a place that’s a little more off the tourist trail, maybe not drawing in the big sugar-obsessed crowds, but standing behind its ancient but experimental and tangy appeal.
