Coffee and Cremsnit in a Romanian Cafe
Whenever I choose to travel somewhere the first question I’m often asked is, “Why?” The question is usually asked because I’m traveling somewhere a lot of people don’t consider when planning a vacation.
I could say I had plenty of reasons for traveling to Romania. Really, though, it came down to one thing: A friend I’d lost contact with for many years but had known since we were in our late teens moved from a small town near Atlanta, GA to Brasov.
And when I first considered what to write about I came up with numerous website names, all somehow related to travel and trying to rhyme with my first name. I mentioned on my Instagram story that I would write broadly about travel and also home in on specific subjects, such as: What cafe you should visit in Brasov, Romania.
Bistro de l’Arte is my answer.
Let’s dive in!
Roasted red pepper cream soup with a huge dollop of aged local sheep’s cheese and fresh bread.
Locally sourced, farm-raised chicken baked in plum sauce, with mashed potatoes whipped with buffalo milk and a whole baked red pepper, all sitting atop a delicious pool of mustard sauce.
Cremsnit, a cake made with homemade vanilla cream between two flaky puff pastries, topped with homemade whipped cream and sprinkled with chopped pistachios and almond slivers.
Perfectly crafted espresso.
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Imagine this scene:
Post-Soviet Eastern Europe. It’s winter, cold and snowy, everyone bundles up tightly with sweaters and jackets and scarves and hats. A family sits at a table ready to eat dinner, the food set out in front of them, steaming toward the ceiling. What food is on the table in front of them?
I didn’t ask that question on my Instagram, but I would guess most people’s answer would be some variety of soup.
Without much money and high-quality ingredients, in the face of blistering wind and snow, people turn to soup. Filling and inexpensive, long cook times tenderize any meat. And it’s hot.
My paternal grandparents, whose parents came from Ukraine, taught me about borscht. Hungarians have goulash; Lithuanians have pickle soup; Georgians have yogurt and dill soup.
Roasted red pepper cream soup isn’t Romania’s national soup; that would be a sour soup with minced pork meatballs. Given the diversity of soups in Romania, a cultural marker borne in many ways from economic necessity (the best and most culturally impacting foods often are), I wasn’t surprised my soup from Bistro de l’Arte was so good.
The sheep’s cheese melted into a creamy white swirl as I stirred in crushed black pepper and coarse ground salt. The cheese thickened the soup even further and allowed the flavors of the soup to settle across my taste buds. There wasn’t one flavor that went unnoticed.
I have a good memory and I did type a few things in my Notes app, but I won’t go into detail about every flavor or scent or sound. Instead, let’s talk about plum sauce.
I think of Romania’s plums like I think of North Carolina’s sweet potatoes. If you’re going to trust a recipe where the highlight is plum or sweet potato, then in some capacity that recipe’s origins should trace back to either Romania or North Carolina, respectively.
Romania produces 20% of Europe’s plums. While much of the plum crop is used in the production of palinka – plum brandy – the number of plum sauces and other dishes whose flavors were emboldened by a plum’s sweetness were many.
In the case of my farm-raised chicken, the plum sauce was not a watery afterthought splashed onto a few cuts of baked chicken. It was perfectly sweet with a slightly acidic bite, like a knife cutting through the crispy skin blanketing the fatty juices that make dark meat chicken so good. It was thick, like a reduction. I picked up on crispy browned bits of chicken scraped from the pan. More accurately than plum sauce, this was a fond de plume. The sauce itself seemed meaty, with chunky bites of plum.
I didn’t wait until the last bite or two to mix up all the flavors on my plate like one does at Thanksgiving. I stripped off a piece of the chicken thigh, coated it in buffalo milk mashed potatoes and soaked it all in the fatty sweet plum sauce settled underneath.
I won’t describe the cremsnit. Best that your first cremsnit experience is in Romania.
As I typed that last block, I had my eyes closed, my brain reconstructing the setting and the flavors. You’re probably confirming your flight to Bucharest. Book a seat for me, too.
I found Bistro de l’Arte how I find many places when I travel. I slowly walk up and down alleys and side streets or ask a bookstore employee the best place to read a book and have some coffee. I listen that the conversations are being held in the native language. Where are the locals ducking in and out of? Is the music local?
Bistro de l’Arte was not only playing music by Romanian artists, they have artwork by Romanian artists on the walls and available for purchase. Their bookshelves feature the works of Romanian poets and historians and novelists.
Look again down the alleyway where Bistro de l’Arte resides, with the pale pastel yellow walls, the bike sitting out front, the window boxes with small gardens of vines and herbs. You can see why I spent so much time pacing up and down Brasov’s old stone alleys.
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You probably won’t be surprised that it’s difficult to find English translations of Romanian novels. A country’s (or region’s, or city’s) literature is immensely insightful to the culture. Fiction, whether literary or genre, takes place in true settings. A science fiction or fantasy setting can metaphorically represent a true setting. Character interactions can reveal so much about social and cultural dynamics, between parents and children, genders, socioeconomic classes, spouses, and so on. A certain author’s popularity or the popularity of a type of story can reveal the mood of an entire group of people at a specific time in history.
Before heading into Bistro de l’Arte I stopped at a bookstore – Libraria Humanitas, near the Biserica Neagra – and asked for a few English translations of Romania authors. The man working the register walked me over to a very small section with some novels, poetry, and history selections.
I bought a small book on the brutal history of communism in 20th century Romania and The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller, for which she received the 2009 Novel Prize in Literature.
The Hunger Angel is a book about the persecution of ethnic Germans in Romania by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. Muller, an ethnic German from Romania, was ostensibly writing about her own experiences. She, as a person and as a writer, suffered at the hands of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime. Her family was forced into labor camps, her works were censored. Reading her works as she intended them to be read in many countries was essentially illegal. The spaces where “intellectuals” gather, like coffee shops and tea houses, are often venues to discuss politics, film and TV, the economy and news not tainted by government propaganda. Those spaces were surveilled by policemen.
Imagine in the United States not being able to pop into your neighborhood coffee shop and openly discuss political ideas or the latest Netflix documentary. That was the reality in Ceausescu’s Romania and in many places still is the reality. Even if one goes into Starbucks with a copy of Animal Farm just to be seen reading Animal Farm, at least they’re reading Animal Farm and have the right and the freedom to do so.
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Which brings me back to Bistro de l’Arte…
I was sitting in a café that likely would’ve been patrolled, if not outright shut down, by the national police force of a communist party, reading The Hunger Angel, a book by… well, you read all the above. Those were the thoughts passing through my head.
I was also listening to the music and reading the book. It helped that I didn’t understand the words being sung. Couples nearby, the waiter checking on me. I sat at a small table by the window to better watch the people outside on a cold but sunny April afternoon. I read a paragraph here and there, looked up to observe the people around me.
“Feel like I could sit in this place for days, drinking coffee and reading,” I captioned a short video I took for my Instagram. “Because a picture doesn’t capture everything.”
The atmosphere brightened the flavor of my espresso and the meal.
There’s a joy that kids seem to find in everyday things that adults often lose sight of. That joy comes out in their words and the sounds they make. That joy is an attitude, an emotion; I didn’t need the words translated.
The universal sound of an espresso machine, patrons stirring cream and sugar into their coffee, creates something like an out-of-rhythm percussion section.
But just like when you’re waiting for the turn signals of two cars in front of you at an intersection to sync up, even for just a few flashes, the sound of excited children and the stirring spoons and steaming espresso machine at times find themselves perfectly in rhythm. The synchrony made me smile. All this time later it still does.
In those moments I can reflect on where I once was in life. When I was younger, no one I knew grew up thinking about spending a couple weeks traveling by train around Romania. We thought about and wanted things that were much more proximal. I thought about turning over rocks in the creek to find a salamander. I wanted a Sprite with the cap that won you another Sprite.
In Bistro de l’Arte, and even in the course of my day-to-day, I consider the history of my surroundings, the events that led to that moment. It sounds corny but a lot happened in the billions of years leading up to that first bite of cremsnit in that Old Town Brasov café. In that moment I’m grateful to exist and even more grateful that in that moment existence was joyful.