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© Chris Allnutt | Breakfast at Mrizi i Zanave agriturismo, northern Albania

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The chefs who came in from

the cold: a culinary tour of
Albania

As the shadow of communism fades, a new

generation of cooks is rediscovering the
country’s gastronomic heritage — and its
potential

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Camilla Bell-Davies MAY 7 2022 12

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It’s a windy afternoon on a hilltop of northern

Albania. A large stone farmhouse stands tilted
against the landscape, surrounded by trees
and wild purple pastures. Inside, amid warm
storeroom shelves laden with olives, honey
and sun-dried tomatoes, chef Altin Prenga is
at work, experimenting with cheese.

The cheeses in question are made with

mountain goats’ milk and are currently
submerged in a barrel of pomegranate juice.
Prenga offers me a tasting, along with wine
from his cellars: both are delicious — soft,
bright and with a tangible taste of terroir. It’s
hard to imagine that for 40 years of
communism, Prenga explains, “cheese came
from the state in a square white block — the
same cheese everywhere”.

Since the fall of Enver Hoxha’s regime in

1990, Albanians have been rediscovering both
their gastronomic heritage and its potential.
Today, like much more besides, cheese comes
in numerous varieties — Prenga makes many
of them at his agriturismo Mrizi i Zanave, set
between the sea and the mountains just
outside the northern village of Fishtë. He once
tried to mature cheese in one of the concrete
bunkers Hoxha erected across the country —
something he says would have the dictator
turning in his grave.

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A sense of calm and orderliness pervades the

place: even the sausages in the smokery
dangle in perfect lines. When evening comes
we sit at long tables by a crackling fire and
feast, first on wild blueberry pasta and a
smoky bean stew, then on rich “peasant
dishes” of roasted lamb, veal and goat. The
puddings are extraordinary: a fruit compote
with crystallised watermelon rind, stuffed
chestnuts rolling in pine syrup, a palate-
cleansing bay leaf ice cream.

Altin Prenga, proprietor of agriturismo Mrizi i Zanave in northern

Albania © Chris Allnutt

Produce on sale at the farm shop on site © Chris Allnutt

The traditional kitchen at Mrizi i Zanave . . .

. . . and a dish of ricotta, liver, sundried tomatoes and rocket paste ©

Chris Allnutt

Prenga set up Mrizi i Zanave 13 years ago in

the belief that Albania “has many things to be
proud of: non intensive farming, small organic
producers, shepherds and bee-keepers”. What
he can’t make on his own farm he sources
from within a 10-mile radius, right down to
the hotel soaps and bed linens. Everything is
used; nothing is wasted. It’s a model of
sustainability and self-reliance that in Albania
is catching on.

I’m here with Elton Çaushi, whose Tirana-

based company Albanian Trip has set up a
gastronomic tour to explore the culinary
reinvention. Mrizi is a good place to start, he
says, to understand the different forces at
work in modern Albanian cuisine. Its menu
follows a middle way between traditional
recipes that some want to preserve intact, and
the fusion being experimented with by more
internationally-minded chefs. Uniting them
however is an attempt to recover the country’s
great culinary variety, a range which comes
from Albania’s mix of mountains, lakes and
fertile Adriatic coastline and from its history,
caught between Mediterranean and Turkic
empires, with the seafaring ancient Illyrians
as a touchstone.

It was the Illyrians who first grew wine here

and sailed it across the Adriatic to Roman
Italy. So says Muharram Çobo of Çobo Wines
in Berat, a historic wine-producing region in
the Osum river valley. He migrated to Italy in
the 1990s, then returned in 2001 to preside
over a vineyard his family had owned for
generations but that had lain dormant during
communism. Fortunately, rare ancient grape
varieties survived the interlude, as did the
knowledge of his vintner father, who helped
him coax the vines back to life.

Shendeverë, a sparkling wine produced by Çobo Wines in the Osum

valley © Chris Allnutt

A selection of homemade rakia, or fruit brandy, at the Hotel

Mangalemi in Berat © Chris Allnutt

As he talks, Çobo pours us his wines to taste,

including the sparkling Shendeverë, from an
Albanian word meaning “the light
contentment one gets from drinking wine”. Its
minuscule bubbles leave a delicate tingling
and melting sensation in the mouth. Notable
among the reds is the E kuqja e Beratit 2013 —
so big and bold it is a meal in itself — and a
rich, olivey Kashmer Grand Reserve 2015,
made with Shesh i Zi grapes which grow amid
the fluffy olive trees that line the hills. From
these grapes, Çobo also produces a sublime
cognac-like brandy, of which he pours us a
generous glass.

We stay in the centre of town at Hotel

Mangalemi, a restored Ottoman mansion once
belonging to the Pasha of Berat. Elegant, and
comfortable, with an oak beamed terrace
overlooking the river Osum, Mangalemi
started as a restaurant and the focus on food
continues. Chef Violeta Mio cooks a local
cuisine of hearty sausages and wild mountain
greens, but it is her “angel hair” baklava that
wins me over — the most delicate I’ve ever
tasted. She also plies us with a fine selection of
homemade rakia, the fruit brandy made in
homes and restaurants across the country,
flavoured with oak, mulberry, quince and an
intriguing cornelian cherry.

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The next day calls for a mild detox, so we set

off along the sweeping Vjosa river valley to
Përmet, a town at the foot of the Nemërçka
Alps. In a quiet canyon beyond the town
bubbles a thermal spring, turquoise as the sky.
Not a trace of human infrastructure surrounds
it, save for a 400-year-old stone bridge that
could have been built by some gentle
mountain giant. We stay for a long soak,
watching the steam rise and dissolve over
snowy peaks, then emerge prune-like and
ready for dinner. For this we descend to the
coast, zipping along a winding road, past
hillsides studded with colourful beehives, with
the scent of sage and oregano carried on the
breeze. The mountains remain with us, until
their vertiginous slopes plunge into the azure
sea.

The 400-year-old bridge at the Bënja hot spring near Përmet ©

Chris Allnutt

The hot spring and the river Lengarica © Chris Allnutt

As the afternoon fades we phone chef Romina

Leka, the owner of a seaside restaurant and
guesthouse in the village of Qeparo. Guests
call ahead and she’ll start cooking whatever
the fishermen have caught that day, along
with vegetables from her garden. With dinner
on the go, we climb the hill to old Qeparo: a
picturesque hamlet of white stone and red
ochre roofs, once a stronghold of rebels
against the Ottoman invaders, now semi
abandoned — most of the inhabitants left in
the 1990s on boats to Italy.

One of the few locals who remained is Vasil

Guma, a historian and author, who explains
that our dinner tonight is somewhat unusual.
Fish was not always eaten here due to a
custom which, for 40 days after a funeral in
the village, forbade locals to eat anything that
bled. Shellfish and shrimp were popular
instead. The fading of this tradition and an
Italian influence has brought fish back to the
table, though Leka remains wary of it and it
can remind families in this area of hard times
when it was the only food available.

Homemade ‘kila’ breakfast doughnuts at Romina Leka’s guesthouse

and restaurant, the Riviera © Chris Allnutt

Beehives in the village of Qeparo © Chris Allnutt

Nevertheless she cooks it beautifully for

visitors, in our case as a warming fish soup
followed by a zesty baked bream. We sleep
soundly after dinner in her small guesthouse,
lulled by the sea swashing over sand. In the
morning, Leka brings clouds of kila
doughnuts drizzled in honey, which we eat
while gazing out to the Ionian Islands.

Further along the coast at Tragjas is a rather

different family-run establishment set on
preserving tradition: Sofra e Vjetër. To get
there, we hike a trail through woods known to
be the lair of wolves and bears. Fortunately,
this morning all is quiet save the goat’s bells
clanging softly in the valley.

From the woods we emerge into a dappled

pasture, surrounded by wildflowers and
roaming farm animals, above which the sea
glitters blue in the distance. A stone
farmhouse comes into sight atop the hill, and
chef Dhurata Daupaj comes out to greet us.

She shows us into a small outhouse where iron

pots, called sač, sizzle over an open fire. Inside
them, veal and potatoes bubble restlessly,
food that Daupaj describes as “primitive,
essential, as wild as possible”. The wood
smoke stings our eyes and perfumes
everything with ash, but Daupaj is unaffected;
she has been cooking this way for years, just
like her mother and grandmother before her.
We sample a tangy fermented cheese called
Salcë shakulli then she takes us into the
garden to gather a colourful bouquet of chard,
fennel and nettle to make the filling of a flaky
pastry burek.

At Tragjas, Dhurata Daupaj cooks traditional stews in iron pots over

open fires © Chris Allnutt

After a while the meat emerges; rich,

succulent and sage-scented. The burek’s bitter
herbs and crisp pastry layers cut through its
smoky depths, though Daupaj laments that we
have come too early in the year — the greens
get sweeter as spring arrives.

When we leave she is in the smoke room

again, slow-roasting goat for a party who have
just driven up — it turns out there is a road
after all. Still, Daupaj rarely uses it as she is
almost fully self-sufficient. She does, after all,
refer to herself as “the lady who lives with the
wolves”.

The next day, I meet another guardian of

tradition in Elbasan, a town just south of
Tirana. Chef Naim Bashmili runs a cookery
school, where he teaches me how to cook clay-
baked lamb and yoghurt tavë kosi — Albania’s
hearty version of a moussaka. While I whisk
eggs enthusiastically, Bashmili tells me that he
wants his students to have a firm grounding in
traditional Albanian dishes, and “to
understand their culinary identity before
globalisation erodes it”. He is ambivalent
about chefs who modify local recipes to suit
trends in fine dining. To him, “it’s not
Albanian cuisine unless you get grease on your
moustache.”

Naim Bashmili, right, teaching Camilla Bell-Davies at his cookery

school © Chris Allnutt

In downtown Tirana, chef Bledar Kola agrees

to disagree. His restaurant Mullixhiu is the
epitome of experimental Albanian cuisine,
and he greets us with twinkling eyes, a shy
smile and slight London accent. He lived in
the British capital for many years, having
arrived from Calais on the underside of a lorry
after fleeing the violence here in the 1990s.
Hired as a pot washer, he worked his way
through London’s kitchens to Le Gavroche,
then undertook a stage at Copenhagen’s
Noma.

His brother Nikolin, an academic and culinary

anthropologist, sees Bledar as part of a
network of young diaspora chefs who are
returning to Albania to find their roots
through food. To help them, Nikolin set up a
project called RRNO Foundation to gather
over 300 recipes from across the country, and
publish them online alongside stories of their
origin and an “ingredient locator” to reduce
reliance on imports.

Bledar argues the fatty dishes of Albanian

cliché “were useful once for an outdoor rural
lifestyle, but not modern urban living”. His
experiments occasionally earn him the
opprobrium of locals (a foray into small plates
was scrapped, many said the small portions
were pointless) but he has won over some of
his home crowd simply by bringing out the