The chefs who came in from the cold: a culinary tour of Albania

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 best from Albanian produce.

His restaurant is playful too: we rummage for spoons in drawers under the table, rest our feet on gourds, and watch chefs slinging dough about in a glass-fronted kitchen. From within it, Mullixhiu’s seasonal metamorphosis menu emerges. We start with a winter salad of pumpkin and jewelled slivers of dried fig. Then comes a crisp sheep’s brain drizzled in a grape juice reduction and a stew of blood-rich kidneys, soft as chestnuts.

Bledar joins us for pudding, a sweet fermented corn maize served in a clay pipe. The meal closes with wine and rakia, and we relax into a state of blissful shendevere. Outside, streetlamps cast their beams into the city’s lake and people spill from bars. I leaf through Mullixhiu’s cookbook, published in German, and think of Nikolin, typing up recipes from across Albania so that the next generation of chefs will have their country’s cuisine at their fingertips, to do with as they please.

Some will take off to kitchens in New York, Rome, London, or perhaps, like Bledar, they will set up shop here. As I ponder, I realise that the restaurant has stayed open late for us; the other customers have already trickled out into the night. Bledar’s small son comes over to join us, clutching his supper of petka — wild mushroom broken pasta — and a book about sauces by Michel Roux. “And he says he doesn’t want to be a chef,” says Bledar, chuckling. “I’ll just make sure he never has to learn the way I did.”

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