Bakeries and Breakfast: What Bulgarians Actually Eat in the Morning

Bakeries and Breakfast on the Nesebar Coast

Hotel breakfast on this coast is an international buffet, which is fine and tells you nothing about where you are. The actual Bulgarian morning happens in a bakery, costs very little, and is over in five minutes.

It is worth doing at least once, and most people who try it do it every day afterwards.

The bakery

Look for a фурна or пекарна — a small shop, often with a window onto the street, selling warm pastry by weight or by the piece. There are several in Nesebar's mainland town and along the main roads of the resorts. They open early, they sell out, and the best ones have a queue of locals rather than a menu in four languages.

Point at what you want. That is the whole transaction.

What to point at

Баница — banitsa — is the one to start with. Filo pastry layered with white brine cheese and egg, baked in a tray and cut into squares. Eaten warm, with the hands, standing up. It is the Bulgarian breakfast, and a good one is one of the genuinely great pastries of the Balkans.

Variants worth trying: тиквеник with pumpkin and often walnuts, the spinach version, and a sweet milk-soaked one called млечна баница.

Мekица — mekitsa — is fried dough, eaten with icing sugar, jam or white cheese. Heavier, sweeter, and a weekend thing more than a weekday one.

Кифла is a soft roll, plain or filled with jam, chocolate or cheese. This is what children eat.

Принцеси — "princesses" — are open-faced toasts with cheese or mince, grilled to order. More of a mid-morning snack than a breakfast.

Погача is a round soft bread, often shared, and it appears at celebrations rather than on ordinary mornings.

What to drink with it

Боза is the traditional partner to banitsa, and the traditional dividing line between visitors who love this country and visitors who do not. It is a thick, fermented, slightly sour drink made from wheat or millet, mildly alcoholic in the way kefir is, and it tastes like nothing else. Bulgarians drink it from childhood. Try it once, honestly, and then decide.

Айран — salted drinking yoghurt — is the other option and is a much easier sell. It is also the best thing to drink in heat that is not water.

Otherwise: coffee, which is its own subject and which Bulgarians take seriously.

What it costs

Very little, which is the point. A piece of banitsa and a drink is a fraction of a hotel breakfast and a fraction of a resort cafe, and the gap between the bakery price and the seafront price is the single biggest saving available to a visitor on this coast.

Bread

Bulgarian bread is good and worth buying daily rather than in a weekly shop. Supermarkets sell it, but a bakery loaf is a different thing.

A cultural note worth knowing: bread carries weight here beyond food. It appears at weddings, at welcomes, at funerals. If somebody offers you bread and salt at a door, it is a formal welcome and you take a piece, dip it, and eat it.

For the apartment

This coast is full of rented apartments with kitchens, and a bakery plus a market makes breakfast trivially easy. Bulgarian white brine cheese, tomatoes in season, bread, yoghurt and honey is a breakfast most people end up preferring to the buffet.

Yoghurt deserves its own line. Bulgarian yoghurt is a matter of national pride and it is genuinely different from what most visitors have at home — thicker, sharper, made with a bacterium named after the country. Buy the plain kind in the big tubs, not the flavoured ones.

Out of season

Bakeries are among the businesses that stay open when the resorts empty, because they serve the people who live here rather than the people who visit. In a coastal town in February, the bakery and the pharmacy are often the two things reliably open.

The short version

Find a фурна, point at the баница, eat it warm with your hands, and try боза once so you can have an opinion. It costs almost nothing, it takes five minutes, and it is the closest thing to an everyday Bulgarian ritual that a visitor can join without being invited.