Are Three Hats Better Than One?

After sleeping through my first evening in Belgrade, I was conscious of my dwindling remaining nights in this city. I needed to see what a restaurant dinner was like here. especially after seeing the availability of great produce earlier in the day, I was eager to see how that translated onto the menu and ultimately the plate. Now I'd like to apologise at the start for the quality of photos in this post, I'm still working out the settings on my camera and I'm trying to avoid using a flash so as not to annoy other diners.

Was it a revelation? A life and perception altering experience? You'll have to keep reading to find out. Don't scroll down to find out because I'm watching!

We decided on the restaurant Tri Sesira (Three Hats) as it is in an area full of restaurants that is usually buzzing with people and each restaurant has a live band that wanders from table to table playing traditional local music. What better way to immerse ourselves in the culture?

The weather was a little on the chilly side, but in true Melbournian style, we opted to sit outside and experience the atmosphere of the area. We had arrived a little early for our 8pm reservation, but there was only one other table with people on it outside and perhaps half the tables inside were full.

Starting off with a shot of Zuta Osa (Yellow Wasp) which is a brand of plum brandy, the waiter suggested a cold appetiser to share consisting of some smoked meats and cheese. How could we say no after the fantastic smoked meats we had seen at the market earlier?


The prociutto was quite nice and the fetta a little too salty for my taste, but overall this was a reasonably good dish to go with our drinks.

The menu was extremely meat-centric (as I expected) but I was disappointed to see very little reflection of the gorgeous seasonal produce we had seen and experienced earlier in the day.

For main course we opted for a selection of mixed meat platters and (because I have to try something a little different) a serve of Gigerice (chicken livers). As a salad I ordered the roasted capsicum.

The salads came first, which smelled amazing and you can see in the photo below how much garlic was used for the dressing.


One disappointing aspect of this dish was that is wasn't cleaned. Normally roasted capsicum would be served with the skin, stem and seeds removed so that the diner just enjoys eating the dish without having to clean around the stem and work their way through the skin. The taste was very nice and perhaps a little more roasting would have brought out more of the sweetness of the paprika and I would probably use less garlic as it was a bit overpowering.

Next came the main course, lots and lots of meat.


There was cevapcici, chicken breast, pork cutlet, shashlik, steak and the livers (wrapped in BACON!). On the side were chips and raw white onion without dressing. Since this is what Serbian cuisine is known for, I was expecting the meat to be delicious and juicy and while I know that Serbs don't usually use spices or sauces in a big way to flavour their meat I was hoping that the natural taste of the produce would stand out.

Unfortunately I was disappointed on almost all counts. By far the best part of the meal so far was the roasted capsicum. The meat was almost universally overcooked, dry and very hard to eat. As far as the meat went, the cevapcici were the juiciest on the plate but couldn't even hold a candle to the ones we get in Melbourne even from the supermarket. The livers were by far the most flavoured thanks in large part to the bacon and were possibly the only item that wasn't completely overcooked. The onion was far too strong to eat and seemed to only have been put on the plate as an afterthought or garnish or just to fill up the empty space.

After the morning at the market and seeing what is available as far as produce goes, I find it very difficult to reconcile in my mind such a sad example of the local cuisine.

Well, putting the main course aside, I hoped that dessert would be able to make up for it at least in some small part. Trying to go for something that was traditional and that would hopefully be something that would be common and hard for them to mess up, I selected crepes with walnuts (something I remember my grandmother making when I was a child). Also the menu suggested that these were then cooked in milk, something a little different but similar ot another dish common to my grandmother's kitchen. Unfortunately I was told this was not available at this time, but having decided on crepes I chose another dish with an interesting description. The one line menu item seemed to be saying that the crepes were served in a zabaglione-type sauce made with wine. This is a sauce made with eggs and sugar and is usually quite sweet and fluffy (very rich and decadent) but I didn't know how the addition of wine would affect it, thinking that perhaps they used a sweet or fortified wine.

Technically, the sauce was smooth, velvety and rich, but the wine they had used had a particularly high acidic taste and could almost be described as sour. I really didn't like this flavour combination and felt it really took a lot away from what, otherwiseW, was a really nice dessert. The crepes were great, the walnuts were a nice textural contrast to the smooth crepes and silken sauce and really held their own, but that wine flavour was just too distracting.

Another distracting thing I thought deserved a mention was the band. There were five of them and they were playing and singing at the top of their lungs and making it impossible to talk to other people at the table. It was ok when they were in another room or at a reasonable distance, but the pair of guys at the table next to us were well and truly into their rakia (perhaps a bottle each) and were tipping the band and signing along.

Overall I felt a little betrayed by this meal. Not necessarily on my own behalf, although I feel I was promised a lot more than was delivered, but I felt betrayed on behalf of the hard-working people I had spent the morning with in the market. People who were proud of their produce and were eager to have people try what they had to offer. I say this because most tourists would experience their first taste of Serbian produce from a restaurant like this one and most would never get a chance to see what is really available to these restaurants as far as raw materials go.

I had to take a step back and reassess how I was judging this meal. Was I being too harsh and judging them unfairly by standards I have become accustomed to in Australia? Sometimes I tend to do that, but I also don't want to make excuses and begin saying things like "This was a pretty good meal.....by Serbian standards" or "As far as Serbian food goes...". I had to know if I was the only one that felt this way, but after asking my parents - who have been to Serbia many times and have eaten at this restaurant previously - their response was similar to mine. They said that this was worse than an meal they have eaten at that restaurant before and perhaps the worst they had eaten at any restaurant in Serbia.

Maybe this is a one-off thing and I guess it would be good to get a bad experience out of the way first and move on to better ones as the days go by, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't starting to become concerned about what I would find.

Stay tuned.