TRAVEL GUIDE
5 MIN
Istrias
The most expensive truffle ever sold at auction came from Istria. The region has no Michelin-starred restaurants. Both of these things are true, and together they tell you almost everything you need to know about how food works here.
"Fuži" with truffles
Hand-rolled pasta, twisted into small quill shapes, made the same way here for centuries. Order it with truffle - white if the season allows, black if not. The truffles come from the Motovun forest twenty minutes up the road, and they've been beating Piedmont in blind tastings for long enough that nobody's surprised anymore. The same ingredient restaurants in Milan and Paris import at considerable expense arrives here over pasta, without fanfare, as if that's simply what lunch looks like. In Istria, it is.
Cured meats
It arrives before you've ordered anything - a wooden board, prosciutto sliced thin enough to see through, a small dish of olive oil the colour of new grass. Istrian prosciutto is air-dried rather than smoked, which gives it a cleaner finish than the Italian version and considerably more restraint. The rest of the board fills in around it: dry sausages, smoked cuts, things with no English translation on the menu. Point at what you don't recognise. This is how most of the best meals here begin.
Maneštra
A slow-cooked bean and vegetable stew that takes all day to make and looks, in a bowl, like the least glamorous thing on the table. Order it anyway. This is food that's been keeping people warm through Istrian winters for four hundred years, and it tastes exactly like that — in the best possible way. Find a konoba where the menu is handwritten and order it without overthinking.
Fish "na gradele"
"Na gradele" means on the grill, and it's the only way to order fish on this coastline. Sea bream, branzino, whatever came in that morning — grilled whole, finished with olive oil and lemon, served with blitva on the side. No sauce, no reduction, nothing that might distract from the fact that the fish is exceptionally good and was swimming this morning. The best versions are found at places close enough to the water that you can hear the boats. Order by weight, share between two, don't rush it.
Istrian Wines
Malvazija is Istria's white — dry, mineral, with a faint bitter finish that works with almost everything on this list. It arrives without asking at most konobas, poured from an unlabelled bottle, and it's consistently better than it has any right to be at that price. Teran is the red: earthy, high in acidity, built for cured meat and slow-cooked food rather than anything delicate. Between the two, Istrian wine covers every meal you'll eat here — and costs roughly what a mediocre glass costs anywhere else in Europe.