Food guide
Eating in Romania: Find the Sour Note, Then the Wine
Romanian food has a reputation abroad for being heavy and unremarkable, and the reputation survives mostly because the thing that makes it distinctive is not visible on a menu. The kitchen is organised around a particular sourness — sharp, savoury, slightly fermented — that the language treats as a category of its own: a soured soup is a ciorbă and an unsoured one is a supă, and they are different things rather than two versions of the same one. Learn to taste for that note and the whole cuisine makes sense. Then order the wine, which you cannot get at home.
Updated 2026-08-16
The sour note, and the soup that carries it
The souring agent is borș — not the beetroot soup of the same name further east, but a cloudy liquid fermented from wheat bran and water, kept going in a jar the way a sourdough starter is, and added to the pot at the end of cooking. It gives a clean, savoury acidity quite unlike lemon or vinegar, and it is the single most Romanian thing in the kitchen. Where borș is not used, the souring comes from fermented cabbage juice, sour cream, unripe fruit or lemon, but the intention is the same and the result is a cuisine that reaches for acid where its neighbours reach for fat or paprika.
Ciorbă is where you meet it. Ciorbă de burtă is the famous one — tripe, garlic and sour cream, a genuinely acquired taste and a legendary hangover cure. Ciorbă de perișoare, with small pork meatballs and rice, is the version most visitors end up loving. Ciorbă rădăuțeană is a chicken-and-garlic variant from the north that is milder and an excellent first attempt. Every one of them arrives with a small dish of hot green chillies and a basket of bread, and the correct move is to bite the chilli between spoonfuls rather than to put it in the bowl.
The rest of the table follows the same logic. Sarmale, the national dish, are minced pork and rice rolled in cabbage or vine leaves and simmered for hours — the cabbage is often soured, which is the point, and they are served with mămăligă and sour cream. Mămăligă is polenta, and it does the work bread does elsewhere: under stews, alongside cheese, fried in slices the next morning. Mici, sometimes mititei, are skinless grilled minced-meat rolls eaten standing up with mustard and beer, and they are the country's great informal food.
The wine you cannot buy at home
Romania is one of Europe's largest wine producers by volume — comfortably in the top handful — and exports a strikingly small share of what it makes. The practical consequence is unusual and worth acting on: this is a wine culture you can only encounter by being here, because the bottles genuinely do not reach foreign shelves in any quantity. The quality has risen sharply over the past two decades, and the prices in-country remain low enough that ordering the better bottle costs less than the ordinary one would at home.
The grapes to ask for are the indigenous ones rather than the international varieties, which are competent and beside the point. Fetească Neagră is the flagship red — dark, plummy, with a dried-fruit character and enough structure to age. Fetească Albă and Fetească Regală are the whites, floral and dry. Grasă de Cotnari makes a celebrated sweet wine in the north-east that has been famous since long before anyone was exporting anything. Tămâioasă Românească is an aromatic muscat relative whose name means the frankincense grape, which tells you what to expect. Ask a waiter for a local red and you will usually be handed one of these.
The other drink is țuică — plum brandy, served in small glasses before a meal rather than after, frequently home-distilled, and considerably stronger than it is presented as being. Its stronger cousin from the north, palincă, is not a beginner's drink. Both are offered as hospitality rather than as a purchase, and refusing outright reads as a small rudeness, whereas accepting a token sip does not.
Four regions, four kitchens
Transylvania eats with a visible Hungarian and Saxon inheritance: paprika appears, goulash-type stews appear, there is more baking and more use of the oven, and the Saxon villages contribute a tradition of smoked meats and dense breads. Moldavia in the east is the heartland of the sour soups and of the country's best-known sweet wine, and its cooking is the closest to what a visitor would think of as archetypally Romanian.
Dobrogea, the coastal region between the Danube and the Black Sea, is the outlier and the most interesting for anyone who has eaten around the region. Centuries of Ottoman and Tatar presence left a genuinely different kitchen — more fish, more lamb, filo pastries, and a use of spice that the rest of the country does not share. Fish soups from the Danube Delta belong here too, and they are among the best things eaten in Romania. The Constanța guide covers the coast this comes from.
And the Banat in the far west, bordering Serbia and Hungary, is the most central-European of the four — lighter, more pastry, more coffee-house habit. Across all four, the deepest current is rural self-sufficiency: a great many households still make their own cheese, cure their own meat, preserve their own vegetables and distil their own brandy, which is why food in the countryside is often better than in the cities and why an invitation to eat at a village guesthouse should always be accepted. The Maramureș guide sets out where that way of life is still ordinary rather than performed.
Where to eat, and what to finish with
The institution to look for is a place calling itself a han or a crâșmă — an inn or a tavern — rather than a restaurant with a translated menu outside. In the cities, the traditional restaurants aimed at visitors are decent and expensive by local standards; the better value is wherever office workers eat lunch. In the countryside, guesthouses serve their own produce and it is regularly the best meal of a trip. Portions everywhere are large in a way that is not negotiable.
Vegetarians have a genuine ally in the Orthodox fasting calendar: for substantial parts of the year observant households eat no animal products at all, and the resulting body of de post cooking — bean stews, stuffed peppers, aubergine salads, mushroom dishes — is real food rather than an afterthought. Asking for something de post is a far more effective request than asking for something vegetarian.
Finish with papanași, and do not be talked out of it: two fried doughnuts of sweetened cheese, one stacked on the other, served hot under cold sour cream and a sharp fruit preserve, usually sour cherry. It is enormous, it is the country's best dessert by a distance, and the sour-cream-and-sour-fruit combination is the same acidity that runs through everything else in the kitchen, arriving one last time on the sweet course.