retiredmartin

October 2023. Sarajevo.

We’d spent two hours in a minibus wondering whether our Bosnian tour guide could get the indomitable US traveller Haley back to a hotel by 20:35 to meet a transfer to a bus to Belgrade from which she would head to Nice, and thence possibly to Chad. We couldn’t keep up with her travels.

Google maps suggested an ETA of 20:39, then 20:32, then 20:37, before arriving serenely outside the Marriott at 20:34:37. Now I know how Phileas Fogg felt, before he invented Mignons Morceaux.

Two of our fellow travellers, exhilarated but hungry after just a sandwich since 8am, decided to find an authentic restaurant.

Apparently you need a reservation, whatever that is, to fit four people into a Sarajevo restaurant at 9pm on a Saturday night. I’m not even sure if I made a reservation for our wedding.

Luckily, opposite the Sacred Heart Cathedral in the heart of the new town,

sat a place that looked just what we needed, particularly as the three non-vegetarians in our group of four could smell the beer from outside.

Klopa (not a Liverpool theme pub) looked a bit like a posh branch of Giraffe, rustic and wholesome.

I’ve never had better service in a restaurant. Elsewhere in Bosnia folk were friendly and efficient rather than engaging. Perhaps that’s because we made no effort to speak the local language.

But here, the nice young (on his first day, apparently), saw our sad hungry faces and found us a high table, apologising that Mrs RM’s legs wouldn’t touch the floor.

And then proceeded to sum us up, take dietary preferences into account, make some very specific recommendations for the three carnivores and our German vegan, and give us exactly the right amount of time to debate, disagree, go “I dunno” and sigh before he came back and I nodded.

He then mad the non-eater move to the end of the table so we could pick away at a plat of food similar to the feast at the top of that lift in “The Platform” (it’s a Spanish film. If you haven’t seen it, don’t).

It was sensational, trencherman fayre, and the chap even recommended the unfiltered pale in a fancy bottle from that Sarajevo brewery. We raised a toast Haley and our tour guide, and anyone who knows me knows I never raise a toast.

And then at the end, the nice man split the bill according to what we ate so some of us could pay by card (a rarity) and some by cash and we wouldn’t complain about folk who eat more than others on Mumsnet.

He was the star of Sarajevo. Whoever he was.