Bulgaria is stuffed full of vegetable plots and orchards, and fresh fruit and veg¬etables are half the secret of Bulgarian food. In the villages, almost all the food comes straight from the land and is organic or free range, as few people can afford pesticides or chemical fertilizers. In the towns, however, 45 years of col¬lectivized agriculture and catering have conspired to impose a certain conform¬ity on restaurants, and the high quality and range of cooking you'll experience as a guest in a Bulgarian home is still rarely reflected in the country's eating establishments.

Grilled meat dishes predominate everywhere, and, despite the wide range and quality of the vegetables available, vegetarians may well be frustrated by the lack of animal-free options. Though the newer restaurants tend to offer more variety, menus remain pretty unimaginative, with a limited choice of dishes on offer. There is, however, an increasing variety of street food available, although traditional Bulgarian pastries and snacks are often a bit too stodgy and greasy for Western tastes.

In big towns and coastal resorts, food shops (hranitelni stoki) are reasonably well stocked with useful domestic picnic ingredients such as fresh bread, cheese (kashkaval Vitosha is made from cow's milk; kashkaval Balkan from ewe's milk), sausages (pastarma is a spicy beef salami; sudzhuk a flat home-cured sausage), smoked leg of ham (pushen but) and dairy products, as well as tinned goods, packet soups, conserves and chocolates imported from Greece or Turkey. In rural areas, food shops are much more sparsely provisioned, with shelves lined with jars of Bulgarian jam, packets of dry biscuits, and little else. Instant coffee is usually vile, and tea is either Chinese or herbal, so it's wise to bring both if you're planning on self- catering.

Fresh fruit and veg is best bought in the outdoor markets (pazar) which you'll find in most towns and villages. Here smallholding peasants from the outlying districts sell whatever produce is currently in season, as well as herbs, nuts, sunflower seeds, dried fruit and pulses. Many towns also have old-style, municipally run indoor markets (hall), though these tend to be sad, half-abandoned affairs with little to offer. Ad hoc street stalls often sell foreign produce such as bananas, coffee and chocolate. City-centre bakeries tend to produce fresh bread (hlyab) throughout the day. In smaller towns and villages, shops selling bread stand empty for much of the day, until an arbitrarily timed delivery attracts queues of shoppers.

Breakfasts, snacks and street food
Traditionally, food was eaten in the fields or pastures, or consumed on returning home -which meant subsisting on bread, cheese, vegetables and fruit throughout the day until an evening meal of stew or grilled meat. Nowadays, people eat rather less frugally, but the habit of picking up a bite to eat in the morning and continuing to nibble at snacks throughout the day still remains. In general, the best advice is to keep an eye out for signs advertising zakuski, a generic term meaning either breakfast or any daytime snack.

In towns and cities, a typical breakfast tends to consist of an espresso coffee and a cigarette, followed by another round of the same if one still feels any hunger. Few restaurants, except for fast-food or self-service places, open for breakfast, and the most convenient places to pick up snack food are the stalls and kiosks that tend to congregate around main thoroughfares, train and bus stations. You can also pick up a pastry from a patisserie (see overleaf), to be washed down with one of two traditional breakfast drinks: yoghurt (kise/o mlyako), or boza, a browny-coloured millet drink that tastes like liquidized breakfast cereal.

The most common Bulgarian snack food is banitsa (often referred to by its diminutive form, banichka, or known in some areas as byurek), a flaky pastry filled with cheese or, on occasion, meat. At its best, the banitsa is a delicious light bite, although it's invariably quite stodgy by the time it reaches the streets. Mlechna banitsa (literally "milk banitsa") is a richer, sweeter version made using eggs and dusted with icing sugar, while the Rhodopska banitsa, found only in the Rhodopes, is more like a souffle filled with cheese.

Equally popular is the kifla, a small bread roll usually made from slightly sweetened dough and with a vein of marmalade running through the middle, although you will probably encounter more savoury variants, filled either with cheese (sas sirene), or a small hot-dog-type sausage (s krenvirsh). Similar is the sirenka, a small bread bun with a cheese filling. Other favourites among street vendors are ponichki, deep-fried lumps of dough, not unlike doughnuts, and palachinki or pancakes, usually stuffed with cheese.

Street stands also sell grilled snacks, which are the likeliest cause of an upset stomach for travellers. Kebapcheta ate wads of mincemeat (traditionally a combination of lamb, pork and veal, although the precise mix depends on what's available) served with a hunk of bread; kyufte is the same in meatball form; while nadenitsa is a spicy sausage. In autumn and winter, vendors emerge peddling corn on the cob (tsarevitsa), and throughout the year incorrigible snack-munchers can find solace in the fastatsi, or roast nuts, and semki, sunflower seeds, sold everywhere in paper cones.

All these traditional snacks are rivalled in popularity by hot dogs, hamburgers and pizzas, which, with a few honourable exceptions, tend to be revolting. The hot dogs are of doubtful composition and gristly consistency; hamburgers often amount to a slice of luncheon meat on a tepid bun, smothered in ketchup; while pizzas are typically rubbery slices with inferior Bulgarian cheese, ham and fish substituted for mozzarella, salami and anchovies. The same goes for open (usually toasted) sandwiches (sandvichi), sold at many kiosks, cafes and bars. Typical toppings are kashkaval, a hard, cheddar-like cheese; salam, an unappetizing slice of pinkish, pork-based meat; kayma, a mincemeat paste; shunka, ham; or kombiniran, a mixture of two or more of the above. Never order any of them without first inspecting what's on offer.

Cakes and pastries are sold throughout the day in a patisserie or sladkarnitsa. Many of Bulgaria's sweet dishes were originally imported from the Middle East by the Turks - the syrupy baklava (referred to in some establishments as a triguna), the nut-filled revane, and the gooey rich kadaif being the most common. Turkish Delight (lokum) and halva are also firm favourites. Betraying a more Central European ancestry are the variety of cakes (torta) on offer, with buttercream (maselna), fruit (frukti) or chocolate (shoko-ladova) filling. Garash, a layered chocolate cake, is the most widely available. Ice cream - sladoled - is sold everywhere on the streets in summer.

Restaurants and meals
Although restaurants (restorant) vary widely in terms of decor and service, it's rare to find any cuisine but Bulgarian, outside of Sofia, and the range of dishes can be pretty limited - in some cases the waiter will merely rattle through a list of what's on that evening. Higher prices in top-notch restaurants don't necessarily imply a wider choice - merely a better quality of meat. Restaurants are usually open between about 11am and 11pm, although many close for a few hours in the afternoon. It's very difficult to get food after 11pm outside big city hotels or package resorts, and in provincial towns you'll be lucky to find anywhere open after 10pm.

The growth in new private places has largely put paid to the former dominance of hotel restaurants, which used to be a focus for the social life of the local elite in provincial towns, but are now mostly sad and soulless affairs. New restaurants catering to the nouveaux riches usually offer slightly more exotic menus than you'll find at the Communist-era restaurants in National Revival-period mansions in Plovdiv or Sozopol, where the food and service often fail to match the setting. As a rule though, you'd do better in a mehana or taverna, which concentrates on grills, salads and other traditional staples, and usually has tables outdoors and music in the evening. A han or hanche - literally an "inn" - is likewise usually decorated in the folk-style and features traditional cooking, while skara-bira are a lower form of culinary life serving little more than beer and kebabs and, in rural areas at least, traditionally a male-only preserve. In towns, you'll also find self-service restaurants (ekspres-restorant), which are invariably cheap, but often with reason.

With the exception of deluxe hotel restaurants in the capital, none of these places will cost the earth, and providing you avoid imported drinks, the bill should be very modest indeed: in most cases, a three-course meal for two, with a bottle of wine, will rarely exceed 15 euro, except in Sofia, Plovdiv and the coastal resorts, where you can expect to pay 20-30 euro for the same.

What to eat
If you're looking for nothing more than a quick and inexpensive stomach-filler, most restaurants sen/e filling soups accompanied by copious amounts of bread. Bob, a spicy bean soup, shkembe chorba or tripe soup, and tarator, a cold soup made from yoghurt and cucumber, are the three most common varieties.

Salads in Bulgaria are usually eaten as a starter, or as the accompaniment to a stiff aperitif, rather like meze in Turkey. Most common are those formed from the following vegetables, whether singly or in combination: cabbage (ze/e), tomatoes (domati), cucumber (krastavitsf) and peppers (piperki or chushki). A meshana salata (mixed salad) consists of cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes; a Shopska salata is the same topped with grated white cheese, while a selska salata comes with a few additional slices of boiled egg. Two yogurt-based salads are mlechna salata (like tarator but thicker, with nuts) and snezhanka (pickled cucumbers covered in yoghurt). Other oft-encountered starters are parzheni chushki, baked peppers; lukanka, a spicy salami-like sausage; and sudzhuk - all of which make an excellent accompaniment to a round of drinks.

Mainstay of any Bulgarian restaurant menu are the grilled meats, of which kebapcheta and kyufte are the most common. More substantial are chops (parzhola or kotlet), or fillets (file or kare), which are invariably teleshko (veal) or svinsko (pork). Main courses may be served with a set garnitura (usually fries and the occasional vegetable), although sometimes you'll find these items listed individually on the menu and will have to order them separately (always ask about this; otherwise you may end up being sewed a slab of meat and nothing else). In the grander restaurants the main course will be accompanied by potatoes (kartofi) and a couple of vegetables, as well as bread: sometimes a pitka or small bread bun, or more rarely a simitla, a glazed bun made from chickpea flour. Lower down the scale, you may just get fried potatoes (parzheni kartofi) and a couple of slices of bread. You're usually expected to specify how many slices (filiiki) you want.

Mehanas and touristy folk-style restaurants are the likeliest places to get traditional Bulgarian dishes baked and served in earthenware pots. The best known is gyuvech (which literally means "earthenware dish"), a rich stew comprising peppers, aubergines, and beans, to which are added either meat or meat stock. Kavarma, a spicy meat stew (often pork), is prepared in a similar fashion, and tastes something like Hungarian goulash. Two other traditional recipes which you may come across are sarmi, cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and mincemeat; and imam bayaldi, aubergine stuffed with all manner of vegetables, meat and herbs - a Turkish dish, whose name translates as "the priest burst", found in the south of the country.

Finally, along the coast and around the highland lakes and reservoirs there's fish (riba) - most often fried or grilled, but sometimes in a soup or stew - and nearly always of a higher standard than the meat dishes. Most coastal snack bars and restaurants offer tsatsa or popche, small white fish which are deep fried in batter and served with fries; and skumriya (mackerel), delicious when grilled. Skumriya na keramidi (literally "mackerel on a tile"), is baked in an earthenware container, usually with a rich tomato sauce. In parts of the Rhodopes and Pirin you'll also find mountain trout, as well as calamari, shark and other riba ot Byaloto More (fish from the White Sea, as Bulgarians call the Aegean).