BIOGRAD NA MORU: Kunjke and prošek delicacies write the new royal menus…discover them in our story

Visit unique restaurants and find out why Biograd na Moru is becoming a place gourmets cannot skip. Enjoy flavours and an atmosphere that take you back in time, and also lead you on a journey full of new, undiscovered tastes.

Dishes made with the kunjka shell (Arca noae, a Noah’s ark clam), specialities seasoned with prošek (a Dalmatian dessert wine) and Mediterranean delicacies carrying royal titles have recently appeared on special menus in Biograd na Moru. The town Tourist Board and the Gastronaut club brought together about fifteen restaurateurs. After careful research into the local food heritage, after combining and testing flavours and textures, and above all after training, they created dishes rooted in tradition or in their own invention. The aim is to build a new food brand for Biograd na Moru, to put the town on gastronomic maps as a destination for people who love good food, and to move beyond the usual tourist offer.

On the new themed menus of the restaurants, bistros and konobas (traditional Dalmatian taverns) taking part in the project you can taste the sea treasures of the Pašman Channel, the farming produce of Ravni kotari, top wines, craft beers and award-winning olive oils. They come together in polished food mosaics in a town where Croatian medieval kings held court, and where conquerors, the Venetians above all, left their mark on the table.

“The Tourist Board of the City of Biograd, together with the Gastronaut club and local restaurateurs, is building the town brand around the food strengths of this area. First of all there are the rare kunjka shells and local specialities that use the dessert wine prošek as a seasoning. The prized kunjke (Arca noae) are one of the reasons gourmets come to Biograd. They are a symbol of the Pašman Channel, they have a distinctive taste and high nutritional value, and through history local people also used their shells in building. They disappeared several times during the last century, but they would come back. This valuable food is full of protein, selenium, magnesium, vitamins B12 and B6, niacin and healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Within this project, kunjke are served on Biograd tables prepared in various ways in the restaurants Kampanel, Europa, Riva, and in the konobas Daniela and Barba,” said Karin Mimica from the Gastronaut club. Together with Nives Jeličić, director of the Biograd Tourist Board, she encouraged the town’s active restaurateurs to come up with new food concepts.

The second delicacy that Biograd is building its own cuisine around is prošek, a dessert wine made from native grape varieties of the Croatian coast. The earliest known records of this wine, made from fully ripe and partly dried grapes and once prescribed by doctors as a medicine, come from the Zadar gazette Gazetta da la Zara from 1844. Prošek is a completely different product from the protected Italian prosecco, the sparkling wine from Veneto, but there were disputes over the name, and over the last fifteen years or so that reduced production in Dalmatia.

Today prošek is defined as a dessert wine made in four areas: Northern Dalmatia, the Dalmatian hinterland, Central and Southern Dalmatia, and Dingać on the Pelješac peninsula. Winemakers who meet the criteria may use the traditional term prošek and sell the wine on the market.

Anyway, put the bureaucratic tangles aside, stop by the Biograd restaurants and taste prošek in the dishes of Mamma Rosa Crvena Luka, Boqueron, Casa Vecchia, Kampanel, Arkada, Riva, Daniela, Europa, Barba, Beštek, Marina Kornati, Park Soline, Bazilika and Dalmaland.

At the Mamma Rosa restaurant in Crvena Luka, as we saw on last week’s food walk through Biograd and the surrounding area, you can try the excellent biogradska teća – a brudet (a Dalmatian fish stew) of fresh fish, langoustines and shellfish, flavoured with prošek. Their new menus also carry tjestenina Crvena Luka (Crvena Luka pasta, a seafood carbonara) and a rich burger with langoustines and prawns. What makes this hidden cove near royal Biograd special is that in the hinterland you can enjoy Vransko jezero (Vrana Lake), and Kornati National Park with its 150 islands, islets and reefs is close by.

If you head through the centre of Biograd, do not miss Dining & Bar Boqueron. This place opened three years ago and serves modern Mediterranean cooking deeply tied to tradition and to seasonal local produce. In a pleasant setting you can try homemade pljukanci (hand-rolled pasta) with the special Zadar black truffle, which local truffle hunters swear is better than the Istrian one. At this time of year Boqueron, which is, by the way, the Spanish word for anchovy, serves risotto with langoustines and local asparagus. For steak lovers they prepare this royal cut of meat in their own prošek sauce, served with bruschetta topped with caramelised onion. Swordfish steak comes with polenta and shallots, plus an anchovy and caper cream. To sweeten the new menu they created a dessert of dried figs in prošek.

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In the heart of the old part of Biograd na Moru, right next to the church of St. Stošija, Casa Vecchia offers a distinctive food experience in an authentic Dalmatian setting. The courtyard sits in deep tree shade and makes an ideal spot to enjoy specialities made from fresh local produce combined with international classics.

Casa Vecchia makes inventive pizzas and burgers, cold meat, seafood and vegan platters and generous salads, and none of it is standard off-the-shelf fare. As part of the project they recently added pizza with smoked swordfish to the menu, which gives the dough strong Adriatic flavours of its own. For burger lovers there is the Biograd smash jam burger, a distinctive combination of a smashed patty with a marmalade of kapula (the local word for onion) and prošek, plus motar (rock samphire) and capers. They also pour carefully chosen craft beers, Neposlušna and Plavuša from the Zadar brewery Brlog, and organic wines from Vinarija Jokić in the village of Polača, on the road between Biograd and Benkovac. That winery, whose roots go back to 1906, is known today for organic wines. The vines are worked by hand, they use only natural fertilisers, and they avoid herbicides and pesticides.

Not far from Casa Vecchia, in the same street, sits the rustic konoba Kampanel. Its menus are written by history and tradition, and finished with the modern cooking of the owner, Stipe Buča. Once a farmer’s konoba used for storing wine, today it is a stop foodies do not skip. Here they can taste pasta with bottarga from grey mullet or with sea urchin, tuna carpaccio with pine nuts, and generous homemade focaccia that Italians, who own this flatbread in their own tradition, would not be ashamed of.

At Kampanel you can also learn how to clean fresh kunjke and then enjoy them in a risotto.

“The kunjka is a fixed part of our menus, and you can find this shell easily right along the coast. It grows on rocky surfaces at depths from half a metre to 15-20 metres. The best time to harvest them is from November to March. We cook them buzara style [a quick sauce of olive oil, garlic, parsley and wine], we serve them with risotto, and we serve them raw when they have just come out of the sea, which may also work as an aphrodisiac.” – said Buča.

The Arkada restaurant is another place with Biograd menus built around prošek. It has a long tradition going back to 1968. It first opened in Tkon, and after moving to the Biograd waterfront it became a fixed stop for lovers of fresh catch from the Kornati islands and of local produce from the hinterland. Under master chef Ružica Prlicarić Tomić and her sister Slavica Eškinja, Arkada has been building its cooking story for four generations. They recently added farm workers’ dishes such as cuttlefish with young broad beans and chickpeas, which people of Biograd ate to recover after hard work, and Adriatic prawns with homemade macaroni shaped over a finger. Both dishes are, of course, seasoned with Biograd prošek.

Nearby, at the Riva restaurant, the project menu lets you try kunjke lešo (simply boiled) or in a risotto, and also a fine lamb shank with sweet potato cream. That is one of the dishes that brings lamb lovers to this place, since lamb is rare in the town centre. Their menu also carries pljukanci with game, and the crispy roast pork called svinjsko carsko pečenje from the old menu is worth keeping in mind.

Walk further along the waterfront and you reach bistro Europa. It is set out as a Mediterranean food museum, full of objects from the past such as bicycles, radio sets, gramophones and even dried fish, in a building where Biograd hospitality has been built over the last hundred years or so. For the last two decades Ana and Damir Torbarina, a married couple, have guided visitors through Europa. Their Biograd cards are kunjke lešo and grilled kunjke, pašticada (a slow-braised beef dish) with prošek, and the Kraljevski rižoto (royal risotto) in the royal town, a reminder of the golden age when King Petar Krešimir IV ruled here.

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Close by on the waterfront is konoba Daniela, where they prepare octopus tentacles marinated in prošek, Kraljevska biogradska buzara (the royal Biograd buzara) and Biograjski brudet s prošekom (Biograd fish stew with prošek), which are also part of the new menus and come, of course, from tradition. This konoba is a small museum in its own way. Historic pictures of Biograd hang on the walls, old boat tools and parts float through the space, and there are old kitchen implements and much else that reflects the fishing and farming history of Biograd na Moru. At Daniela the dishes follow old recipes, they grow some of the vegetables themselves, they buy goat cheese from a producer on Dugi otok, and shellfish and fish from local fishermen.

In the old town centre is Beštek, a pizzeria with inventive pizzas made with oborita riba (larger prime fish) and smoked fish. For the new Biograd menus they built the pizza Crna Kraljica biogradskog mora (black queen of the Biograd sea) around mozzarella, cuttlefish cooked in prošek and its own ink, chickpeas and cherry tomatoes. They also created the Pizza dima (smoke pizza) topped with tomato, mozzarella, pieces of smoked tuna prosciutto, swordfish and mussels, marinated prawns and motar. For dessert you can try Birramissu, a successful version of tiramisu where dark beer from the Zadar brewery Brlog replaces the coffee.

We also visited konoba Barba, where the team of Dino Bralić serves simple, fresh seafood from their own catch in a rustic setting. Their menu holds as many as 60 dishes, and we tried anchovy brudet, octopus under the peka (a bell-shaped lid covered with embers), a platter of fresh plava riba (oily fish), which is becoming a real rarity on Dalmatian menus, and, of course, the unmissable kunjke.

“All the seafood specialities are made from the catch of our own boats, and the dishes follow traditional recipes. That way we guarantee a tasty and healthy meal, and we serve home-grown vegetables with it. For the full Mediterranean experience there are also top local wines, carefully chosen to match every dish” – says the team at Barba.

For those looking for elegant courses, the right address is Marina Kornati in Biograd. It covers more than 90,000 square metres of sea surface and almost 40,000 m² of land, which makes it one of the largest marinas in Zadar County and a driver of nautical tourism on the Biograd riviera. The food in the marina restaurant is built on seafood, and part of it is adapted to guests from different parts of the world. There you can taste tuna and beef tartare, ravioli filled with oborita riba and Pag skuta cheese in a fish demi-glace, a plate of grilled swordfish, tuna, gilthead bream and squid fillets, and pijane smokve (drunken figs), which we tried with the wines and olive oils of MasVin – the short name of the agricultural cooperative “Maslina i vino” from Polača.

Biograd is also a well-known nautical centre, and last year it received the international Turistička prizma award for it. Alongside the food, you can stretch your legs in the national parks Kornati and Krka, as well as the nature parks Telašćica, Vransko jezero and Paklenica.

The adventure park Dalmaland. is part of this story too. They welcome you with the cocktail “Dalmacija u mom soku” (Dalmatia in my juice), which mixes loza (grape brandy), freshly squeezed lemon juice, orange juice, sage syrup, olive oil, honey and cucumber. After that you can walk on through Dalmaland and try the many attractions. The park is divided into four themed areas – Pirate Town, Wild West, Space and Water World, and it offers everything from adrenaline rides to family fun. To close the food walk they presented Zabatak Royal transformation – a royal zabatak (poultry leg quarter) that turns little princes and princesses into kings and queens; and pašticada “Opijeni morem” (drunk with the sea) – slow-cooked frikando (fricandeau, a slow-braised cut of veal) with a sea stone in a prošek sauce with homemade njoki (gnocchi).

Dishes with kunjke: Kampanel, Europa, Riva, Beštek, Daniela and Barba.

Dishes with prošek : Mamma Rosa Crvena luka, Boqueron, Casa Vecchia, Kampanel, Arkada, Riva, Daniela, Europa, Barba, Beštek, Marina Kornati, Park Soline, Bazilika and Dalmaland.

Dishes with royal titles: Daniela, Europa, Riva, Arkada, Beštek and Dalmaland.

PHOTO: Rino Grpuzo & Mak Jovanović

Kunjke, other shellfish and the menus built on them are covered by chefs in the training courses of the ŠKMER Academy.