If the Balkans have a secret food capital, it is Novi Pazar. Five centuries of Ottoman kitchen culture, high-altitude dairies on the Pešter Plateau, and a bazaar that never stopped trading created a table you will find nowhere else in Serbia. Here is what to order, and how to order it like a local.
Mantije — the dish the city is famous for
Small, crisp, bite-sized pastries filled with spiced minced beef, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in round metal pans and baked until the tops blister. They arrive cut into a slab and — this is the crucial part — buried under thick, cold local yogurt. Eaten fresh out of the oven in the Old Bazaar, they are the single best reason to skip breakfast at your hotel. Locals eat them in the morning; a second round after midnight is also culturally approved.
Novopazarski ćevapi
Novi Pazar plays in the great ćevapi rivalry with its own style: smaller, intensely seasoned grilled beef fingers served in a soft, steaming pitica (somun flatbread) with raw onion and kajmak (clotted cream). Sarajevo and Leskovac partisans argue; we simply eat.
From the Pešter highlands: Sjenica cheese & sudžuk
The Pešter Plateau above the city is one enormous natural dairy. Sjenica sheep's cheese — white, layered, faintly sharp — and smoky dried beef sausage (sudžuk) come down from the plateau to the city markets. Buy both; they travel well.
Sand-brewed coffee & Ottoman sweets
Coffee in the bazaar is still brewed the Ottoman way: the džezva pushed into a tray of hot sand until the foam rises, served with rahat lokum (Turkish delight). Follow it with tulumbe (fried syrup-soaked pastry), baklava, or halva from one of the bazaar's sweet shops.
Where to eat
The highest concentration of the real thing is in and around the Stara Čaršija — follow the smoke and the queues of locals rather than signs in English. For fresh lake trout, drive out to the family restaurants on Ribariće Lake. Our collective also arranges home dinners with local families — the mantije benchmark against which all bakeries are measured.
Hungry already?
We arrange bazaar food walks, home-cooked dinners with local families, and coffee tastings. Tell us what you like and we will feed you accordingly.
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