Serbian Food: 15 Dishes to Try

Serbian food is grilled meat, soft white cheese, roasted peppers and fruit brandy, and it is very good and very cheap. Order ćevapi with a lepinja flatbread, a spoon of ajvar and a scoop of kajmak, and you have eaten the country in a single plate for the price of a coffee back home. This is a cuisine built on the roštilj (the grill), on the Sunday lunch table, and on the kafana, the smoky old tavern where the food comes with rakija and, if you are lucky, live music.

The list below is what to actually order, dish by dish, with a rough idea of how each one is pronounced and where it is best eaten. Portions run large, meat runs central, and vegetarians will lean on the cheese pies, the bean pot and the pepper spreads. A quick note on prices: everything here is inexpensive by Western European standards, but exact numbers move with inflation and the venue, so treat any figure as a rough steer and check the current menu.

The grill: ćevapi, pljeskavica and roštilj

Start with the roštilj, because grilled meat is the heart of it. Ćevapi (say cheh-VAH-pee) are little skinless fingers of minced meat, usually a pork and beef mix, sometimes lamb, grilled hard over coals and served in a pillowy lepinja flatbread with a fistful of raw chopped onion. You add the extras yourself: kajmak and ajvar almost always, sometimes a squirt of hot sauce. A standard order is five or ten pieces. They came up through the Ottoman grill tradition and travelled north from southern Serbia, and the town most serious about them is Leskovac, which treats grilling as close to a civic sport.

Pljeskavica (plyes-KAH-vee-tsa) is the same meat idea pressed into one big patty, seasoned with paprika and grilled until the edges char. People call it the Serbian hamburger, though the good ones are wider than any burger and come either on a plate with sides or crammed into bread as street food. Look for the gurmanska version, which is stuffed with cheese or kajmak so it oozes when you cut in. If you cannot choose, order a mešano meso, the mixed grill, and you get ćevapi, a pljeskavica, a cutlet and sausages on one board to share. For where the grill and the late night meet in the capital, see our guide to Belgrade nightlife, since a plate off the roštilj is how most nights out end.

Karađorđeva šnicla

Ask a Serb which dish to try and this one comes up fast. Karađorđeva šnicla (kah-rah-JOR-jeh-va SHNIT-sla) is a slab of veal or pork beaten flat, spread thick with kajmak, rolled up, breaded and deep-fried until golden, then served with tartar sauce and a wedge of lemon. Cut it open and the melted kajmak runs out, which is why its nickname translates as roughly “a girl’s dream.” It is rich enough to defeat most people, so come hungry.

It is also younger than it looks. The story goes that a chef named Mića Stojanović improvised it in the mid-1950s at the Golf restaurant in Belgrade’s Košutnjak park, when an order for chicken Kiev arrived and he had neither the chicken nor the butter to make it, so he reached for veal and kajmak instead. Stojanović went on to cook for Tito. The dish took the name of Karađorđe, the leader of the first Serbian uprising, and became a national favourite. Exactly which year it appeared is disputed, so take the date loosely, but the improvised-Kiev origin is the version everyone tells.

Sarma, pasulj and the slow pot

Not everything is off the grill. Sarma (SAR-ma) is the winter and celebration dish: cabbage leaves, usually soured, wrapped around minced meat and rice, then stewed slowly with smoked meat until the whole pot goes soft and tangy. Every family swears theirs is best, and most agree it tastes better reheated the next day, so if you see it on a menu it has probably been sitting happily since yesterday. It shows up on the slava table (more on that below) and at Christmas.

Then there is beans, which Serbia takes seriously. Čorbast pasulj (CHOR-bast PAH-sooly) is a soupy bean stew slow-cooked with smoked pork and paprika, a working lunch that fills you for the afternoon. Its cousin prebranac is baked rather than soupy, layered with a lot of sweet onion and often made without meat, which makes it one of the safer bets for anyone off pork. Neither is glamorous. Both are exactly what you want after a cold morning.

Ajvar and kajmak: the two you spread on everything

If you take one edible souvenir home, make it a jar of ajvar (EYE-var). It is a relish of roasted red peppers, sometimes with a little aubergine, blended with garlic and oil and cooked down until it is thick and smoky. It comes mild (blagi) or hot (ljuti), and Serbs make it in autumn when the peppers are cheap and roast in the yard, jarring enough to last the winter. Spread it on bread, pile it next to grilled meat, or eat it with a spoon while nobody is watching.

Its partner is kajmak (KYE-mak), a soft, slightly sour dairy cream skimmed and matured somewhere between clotted cream and a young cheese. Fresh, it is mild and spreadable; aged, it turns sharper and firmer. It lands on your breakfast bread, on top of grilled meat, and inside karađorđeva. Along with those two, watch for urnebes (OOR-neh-bes), whose name literally means “chaos”: a fiery spread of crumbled white cheese, kajmak, garlic and hot red pepper, strongest in Niš and the south, and served alongside the grill. It is hotter than it looks.

Bread, pastry and the bakery run

Serbian bakeries, the pekara, are where breakfast happens, and the thing to buy is burek (BOO-rek): filo pastry coiled around a filling, most classically minced meat (sa mesom), also cheese (sa sirom), spinach or potato, baked until the top shatters. The honest footnote is that burek is Ottoman in origin and shared across the Balkans rather than uniquely Serbian, but it is a fixture of the morning here, especially down south, and it pairs by tradition with a drinkable yogurt. One wedge is a meal.

The one to sit down for is gibanica (ghee-BAH-nee-tsa), a pie of filo layers bound with eggs and salty white cheese, baked until the top is crisp and the middle stays custardy. It turns up at breakfast, at every celebration, and any hour you want cheese. Alongside it you will meet proja (PROH-ya), a dense golden cornbread served as a side, sometimes with cheese folded in, that soaks up bean juice and grill fat beautifully.

From the river: riblja čorba and mućkalica

Two regional stews are worth chasing. Up in the flat north, in Vojvodina and along the Danube, riblja čorba (RIB-lya CHOR-ba) is a fiery paprika-red fish soup made from river catch with onion, garlic and chili, thin and hot and the sort of thing fishermen argue over. Order it near the water and it is a proper starter.

Down in the south, around Leskovac, mućkalica (MOOCH-kah-lee-tsa) is what happens to yesterday’s grill: chunks of leftover pork thrown into a pan with onion, roasted peppers, tomato and enough paprika and chili to wake you up, then cooked into a loose, spicy stew. It is smoky, generous and unfussy, and it tells you a lot about how nothing off the roštilj goes to waste. This southern heat is easiest to find in Niš, and our guide to Niš is a good pairing if you are heading that way for the burek and the grill.

Rakija, palačinke and the sweet end

No meal opens or closes without rakija (RAH-kee-ya), the fruit brandy that is practically the national handshake. The classic is šljivovica, distilled from plums, but you will also be poured apricot (kajsija), quince (dunja) and pear (viljamovka). It is strong, it is often homemade, and it is offered as a welcome, an aperitif and a nightcap. When someone’s grandfather brings out a bottle with no label, that is the good stuff, and refusing the first small glass is poor form. There is a lot more to it than one paragraph can hold, so for the full story, the fruits, the copper still, the slava ritual and how to drink it, see our guide to rakija, Serbia’s national drink.

For dessert, keep it simple with palačinke (pah-lah-CHEEN-keh), thin crêpes rolled around chocolate spread, jam, walnuts or sweet cheese, sold at street windows late into the night. And if you happen to be invited into a Serbian home for a slava, the family’s Orthodox patron-saint feast, you will be handed a spoonful of koljivo (also called žito) on the way in: boiled sweetened wheat with ground walnuts, a ritual dish that stands for remembrance and renewal. Take the spoonful. It is a small, serious gesture of welcome, and the meal that follows will be enormous.

Where and how to eat it

The single best place to eat most of this is a kafana, the traditional tavern that trades in grilled meat, cold spreads, rakija and, on a good night, live folk music. It is unhurried by design: you sit, you graze, you drink, and the afternoon disappears. For the full run of them alongside the sights, our things to do in Belgrade guide points you at the districts where the old kafanas cluster.

A few habits that help. Meals are relaxed and portions are big, so order less than you think and add more. Coffee is Turkish-style and slow, meant to be lingered over rather than downed. Many kitchens still lean cash-first, especially the small grills and bakeries, so keep some dinars on you. And do not fill up on the first plate: this is a table built for grazing across cheese, pepper, bread and meat, ideally with a glass of something plum-based in reach.

Come with an appetite and an open mind about breakfast pastry, and Serbia feeds you very well for very little. Give the international chains a miss, walk toward the smell of the grill instead, and if a local offers to pick the rakija, say yes.