As a tourist it can sometimes be tough to actually find that “authentic” dining experience we’re all seeking after. I mean, you’re in Slovakia, so any food you eat is going to be, like, Slovakian.
So I assumed that actual Slovakians in Slovakia would go out to a restaurant specializing in “Slovakian” food about as frequently as an American would go to a restaurant billing itself as serving “American” food. Like, never.
But I might’ve been wrong.
On our first night in Strba, looking around for a restaurant that served traditional Slovakian fare, we found this place, on the road up to Vysoke Tatry:
Restauracia Koliba Zerucha. It was perfect! Old wood construction, both inside and out; sheepskins thrown over the backs of chairs (as ubiquitous as it is kind of random in a certain type of Slovakian restaurant); hearty, carby foods in variations I’d never heard of. We were pretty happy at this manifestation of authentic Slovakian cuisine!
And then, at the summit of Narodny park, between Ruzomberok and Banska Bystrica (a pretty well-established Slovakian ski resort, it looked like), we were delighted (and a tad disconcerted) to come upon this authentic-looking place:
We ate there, enjoying the wood decor, the Slovakian food, the neighborhood cat (whom Liam named Koliba, duh):
We stayed at a small mountain down in South-Central Slovakia called Vyhne. On the road out of Vyhne, we noticed…
And near my father’s old town of Hochwies (now Velke Pole), we enjoyed wonderful food (and endured terrible service due to a slow-moving wedding party) here, at Koliba Riecky:
At this point I finally began figuring out that Koliba is not just a Slovakian word for “Restaurant,” or something. Yup, it’s a chain. And it is ubiquitous in Slovakia. I mean, on a 45 minute drive through the country we’d pass 3 or 4 different Koliba restaurants. It became a game for us: “Koliba!” someone would scream out as we drove some green wooded way, and there it’d be — all wooden and well-tended and Slovakian.
Does that make it more authentic, or less authentic? The difference is semantic, I reckon.
But for me, a carb-addled American tourist with romantic ideas of what authentic Slovakian peasants ate, I was just happy to have a reliably good place to indulge my fantasies of authenticity, and other of my appetites:
Thanks, Koliba.
The Wild Blue 