Belgrade Food & Drink Festival

Belgrade, 12-13 June, Kalemegdan Fortress, 38°C.

Kalemegdan scenery.

About

Imagine a picnic or a sophisticated garden party in a huge park that is also an important historical site with thousands of guests. Invite the best local restaurants to cater with top specialties this event, the best beverage manufactures and wine makers to quench your thirst. Combine this with the live music and entertainment, top culinary Chefs to share tips, many delicacy dishes that you can taste the whole day, the company of famous and interesting people and you will get the idea of the first Belgrade Food & Drink Festival.

After New York, London, Prague, Melbourne, Singapore and many other world metropolises, Belgrade too is finally host of the first festival of this kind in the country and in the region. The festival has already gained the status of an official city event and has official support from: the City of Belgrade, The Tourist Organization of Belgrade and the Belgrade Kalemegdan Fortress.

The basic idea of the festival is to offer its visitors the opportunity to have a completely new, epicurean and hedonistic experience for all the senses by tasting the most spectacular delicacies of the 20 most well known restaurants of Serbia. In addition to restaurants, Festival visitors also had a chance to experience the best of what some of the most famous food and drink manufacturers, as well as catering services, wine makers, pastry and dessert makers have to offer. Each exhibitor had their own display stand.

I was on the site, on behalf of Foodbuzz with my boyfriend Mateja and friend Sanja, executive editor of Serbian edition of Sale & Peppe magazine. She also helped a lot in writing this post ♥

Mamma's Biscuit House

Piggies; Igor Mitrović, owner of Mamma's Biscuit House

Mamma's Biscuit House is one of the most famous and most visited pastry shops in Belgrade. The piggies above are their signature miniature cakes made with ground Plazma biscuits, white chocolate and redcurrants.

Miloš Maravić and Aca Tmušić preparing berry trifle.

Milos was the head chef and pastry chef in restaurant Zaplet for about 7 years. He has recently decided to focus more on pastry, so for a few months now he is a pastry chef in Mamma's Biscuit House. On the spot, with the assistance of Aca, he made wonderful and huge berry tifle and also gave me the recipe which I will post soon :)

Sanja with her boyfriend Miloš :)

Zaplet

Lamb kapama

Zaplet is one of, if not the best Belgrade restaurant internationally famous for successfully combining Serbian with international cuisine. Their head chef Mirko Stojić made lamb kapama, Serbian dish cooked sous-vide. On the top is Greek yogurt and spring onion ice cream and all is topped with Parmesan foam. It is served with homemade focaccia (Zaplet makes their own selection of breads). This was most definitely, the best meal I had on site!

Pistachio ice cream sandwich; Sanja and Mirko

Mirko also made two types of ice cream sandwich cookies. Pistachio that you can see on the photo and extraordinary pop corn flavored, the one that didn't make to the post as it all melted down :)

Mojito

Frenki

As well as being a pastry shop, Mamma's biscuit House is also a coctail bar. They saved the day with a huge selection of Mojitos. I don't think we would have survived the heat if there weren't them.

Frenki, the cocktail grandmaster, used to work in English restaurants for a long time. Today, he is a manager and a cocktail master in Mamma's Biscuit House. For them he invented over a 15 different types of Mojitos!

Minja

I also had a chance to meet up with my friend bloggers Minja and Ana and the girls from Minja's forum :)

And of course, a huge thank you to Foodbuzz for arranging me to get a press pass as a part of Foodie Correspondence Program!