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After a day of travelling and snorkelling at the beach, our hostel owner organised a meal for his guests in a restaurant up in the mountains. This was a very rural place called Nono Ban, which served meat and vegetables from its farm, and freshly caught local fish. This was the real deal.
We got there with 2 other guests, and were greeted by an extremely friendly restaurant owner (who we never learned the name of), but he insisted on learning all of our names and making sure we had as authentic an experience as possible. The tables were all outside in the yard, which was full of trees and overlooked the countryside. The tables themselves were great slabs of marble supported by big posts. We had no idea how much this was going to cost us, but it already looked expensive.
First of all, we were all given a glass of liqueur that the owner called rogač, which after some research seems to have been a drink made with crushed carob pods. It is a traditional Croatian pre-meal drink, and the Croatian way is to down it. I did it (in 2 goes) and it may as well have been turpentine it was so strong. Our throats were burning afterwards, and we sat down, unaware as to what was coming next.
The first of 3 courses that we didn't ask for was brought to us. I say we didn't ask for it because there was no menu, they just brought out the food. This was a salad and bread course, which we nibbled at as the fish course was put in front of us. This consisted of 3 anchovy fillets, a lump of chopped tuna and a whole sardine with head. Anna, unsurprisingly, looked appalled at the head as the rest of us were getting on with it. The sardine was cooked with rosemary and was very tasty, but I had to decapitate Anna's fish for her and put the head on my plate. This course was accompanied by (probably expensive) mineral water and home made white wine.
The main course was 2 big dishes full of cuts of lamb and beef, with roasted potatoes and carrots. The vegetables were excellent, and the lamb was the best I've ever had, but the beef was very fatty, and under the ever darkening sky it was difficult to distinguish meat from fat. This course was interrupted by a moth that decided to crash land in the lamb dish and drown in the juice.
Then came the red wine, which even I could tell was strong. Other guests were refusing this but I, determined to make the most of the occasion, had theirs. As a result, by the end of the evening, Anna and I were quite drunk. The bill came - 2740 kune, which translates as around £295. We split this between 12 guests, so we paid 458 kn, money which we really needed to save.
The food, although excellent, was sometimes hard to handle as there was a lot of it and it was difficult to actually see it. We paid as much for the experience as we did for the food, and we were given a doggy bag of the left over lamb and beef to take home. Having nowhere to put this, and reasoning that there would probably be a moth corpse in there somewhere, this went straight in the bin, as, although it was very tasty, we didn't want to be carrying around great lumps of meat with us all the time and we didn't fancy it for breakfast. Great fun though, and we feel we have 'done' Croatia a bit more, now we are not just staying in hostels overnight.
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