Slovakia has some amazing food although I wouldn’t call it well balanced food. What I mean by this is I personally wouldn’t call potato dumplings covered in goats cheese topped with a side of bacon a meal I could get all my vitamins for the day from, this of course doesn’t take anything always from how good that sounds to eat, this is Bryndzove Halusky a very traditional Slovakian meal. To find food like this a great place we found to eat at that was relatively inexpensive and where the food tasted great was the Slovak Pub, Bratislava’s largest pub, Katie had the Bryndrove Halusky and I went for what you can see in the above picture, cant remember the name of it now but it was basically meat and spinach fried into those small cubes covered in some kind of sour cream and it was delicious, these were also 2 of the cheapest things in the menu at about £6-£7 each. If you want to dine on a smaller budget I would recommend going here and just having the soup which was around £3 each, it was extremely filling, so much that we wouldn’t of even ordered a main to follow, I mean we could of decided not to eat two slices of bread each with the soup and had more room for our mains but when your travelling and you pay for something you eat it even if you usually wouldn’t. We even joked that we was in our own kind of eating competition.
This soup did lead to one bad situation for me later during my time in Bratislava, we went out to the Kamzik TV tower Bratislava’s second highest point to the brasserie restaurant/café there, also had soup once again expecting it to be as good as the one from Slovak pub, it was not! Tripe soup! No one from my generation likes tripe soup, I had never even tried it before yet I knew I wouldn’t like it, no matter how good the taste could be and it isn’t that good at all. Coming from England where some of us don’t even like fat on our bacon (Katie) the thought of the chewing on the inside of an animals stomach is actually repulsive. If your somewhere in the middle though between not liking tripe soup but liking fat on your bacon, throughout the countries I have been to so far the pork dishes although a bit fatty tend to be the tastiest, and as pork usually is, relatively cheap for whatever restaurant you walk in to, watch out for the pork knuckle though, that is alot of fat, still very tasty though.
Kamzik Tv Tower
If your staying in central Bratislava like we was getting to Kamzik TV tower is about a 2 hour 30 min walk, if you look online for other ways to get there there is a bus that takes you half the way but the last half you still have to walk, for us it was a nice day and good to have an excuse to do a bit of exercise. If you look on other online pages some will recommend that you only want to do this journey by car, but if your relatively fit you will be ok.
There are two places you can dine in Kamzik Tv Tower, you have the Altitude restaurant and the Brasseria, we went to the brasseria, its the cheaper of the two and we really only came her for the view, in either place you have to buy something to stay for the view. The Brasseria is actually higher up in the building anyway. When you sit down the menu will be on the table, there is an english side with meals ranging from £15-£20 and a side in slovakian and if you choose from that side ypour meal will be around £6-£8, now beware though, remember . . . tripe soup! Each meal on this side somes with a starter of soup, beef or vegetable the beef is obvioulsy the tripe soup, we both fell for it so I can’t say whether the vegetable is much better but I would go for it none the less. Oh and the (beef) soup also comes with a partially uncooked egg in it, my favourite part of the dish.
Still we was very pleased with the views, they say that you can see the territories of the countries that border with Slovakia, if you know where to look. We took a few pictures as you can see below, although the camera doesn’t do it justice as it was a sunny day so you get alot of glare on the picture from the window.
When your finished inside the tower ask the waitress to point out to you where you can get the cable car from, be careful though, if you are afraid of heights, or are big on health and safety this might not be for you, there are no seat belts, you are held in by a bar across the chest that you lock in with your feet. Also another problem with this is when we went there the man at this end of the cable car said you could only buy tickets from the bottom, he was quite adamant, persist with him though, say please a lot and he will eventually radio down to the ticket office at the bottom and tell them he is sending you down to pay.
This takes you down to Zelezna Studnicka a forest park that is a great spot for bbq’s we saw at least three groups with that exact idea, take a left at the road and you have a long straight walk for about 45 mins, its really beautful and when you get back to the edge of the city you can take the bus 212 back into the centre. Along this walk look out for a small pond on the right hand side, you will see it by a board with pictures of frogs on it. The time we went there it was filled up with no less than 500 frogs, it was quite something to listen to, a constant loud murmour of croaking. Every white spot you can see in this picture is the white chin of a frog sitting just above the water.
