Montenegrin Food: 15 Traditional Dishes to Try

Montenegrin menus are short, cheap by western European standards and written in a language most visitors do not read - so people default to grilled fish and pizza and go home having missed the country’s real cooking. Here are 15 dishes worth ordering, what each one really is, and where it belongs: the coast eats Venetian-influenced seafood, the mountains eat smoked meat, cornmeal and cream, and the two halves of the menu barely overlap.

The short version: order the way locals do and two of you can eat well for the price of one tourist main, because the best of this food is cheap, filling and hidden a few streets back from the seafront. For the two cuisines, the wines and how to read a konoba, our what to eat in Montenegro guide sets the scene; this page is the list you order from.

The mountain table

Everything on this half of the menu starts with preservation - smoking, salting, drying - because that is how a mountain village ate through winter before refrigeration. The result is heavy, cheap and very good, and it tastes almost nothing like the food two hours away on the coast.

1. Njeguški pršut. Dry-cured ham from the village of Njeguši on the slopes of Lovćen, sliced paper-thin and served raw. It is salted for about three weeks, pressed for another three, lightly smoked over beech and then dried and matured for months in air that is half cold mountain, half salt Adriatic. Order it as a starter, ideally with cheese and olives. If you drive over Lovćen, buy it straight from the village smokehouses.

2. Njeguški sir. The ham’s partner: a firm cheese from the same village, often kept in oil, which makes it richer and saltier than it looks. A plate of pršut and sir with bread is the standard Montenegrin welcome, and it is a full lunch for two.

3. Pljevaljski sir. From Pljevlja in the far north, a salted, aged white cheese with a sharper, crumblier character. It turns up in pies and salads inland. Worth asking for by name if you have already had the Njeguši version and want the contrast.

4. Kajmak. Fresh cream, salted and pressed until it sets somewhere between clotted cream and a mild soft cheese. It goes on bread, on grilled meat, into cornmeal. A spoonful melting on hot ćevapi explains most of Balkan cooking in one bite.

5. Kačamak. The dish people call the national one: cornmeal cooked with potato and beaten with butter and kajmak until it is glossy and heavy, served with cold milk, buttermilk or yoghurt on the side to cut it. Treat a bowl as a meal, not a side. Its close cousin cicvara is the smoother, creamier version of the same idea.

6. Popeci. Also called Njeguški steak or Podgorički popeci: a thin escalope, usually veal, beaten out and rolled around Njeguški pršut and cheese, then breaded and fried. It is the Montenegrin answer to cordon bleu, and it is enormous - a single one is a full dinner. Menus in the mountains and in Podgorica list it as a house speciality.

7. Jagnjetina ispod sača. Lamb (or veal, teletina) baked with potatoes and vegetables under a sač - a heavy metal bell buried in embers and ash. The slow, sealed cooking is the point: the meat falls apart and the potatoes taste of the lamb. It is a celebration dish, usually cooked outdoors and often ordered ahead, so ask in the afternoon for dinner rather than expecting it on demand.

8. Japraci. Stuffed leaves, Montenegrin style: minced meat and rice rolled up and simmered slowly. Vine leaves are the common version; up in the highlands the leaf is raštan, the local collard, which gives a deeper, more cabbage-like flavour. If you like dolma, order these and see which leaf your konoba uses.

9. Raštan. The same collard, this time stewed on its own with smoked pork ribs or a ham hock until both go soft. Winter food, cheap, and one of those dishes that never appears on a tourist menu because nobody thinks visitors will order it. Do.

10. Čorbast pasulj. Bean stew with smoked ribs, sausage and salami, soupier than a cassoulet and thicker than a soup. The everyday lunch of inland Montenegro and the best-value hot meal in the country. Sarma - sauerkraut leaves rolled around pork and rice - belongs to the same cold-weather family.

The grill, which is everywhere

11. Ćevapi and pljeskavica. Not uniquely Montenegrin - the whole Balkans claims the roštilj - but this is what people actually eat. Ćevapi are small grilled rolls of minced meat, served in flatbread (lepinja) or on a plate with raw onion, ajvar and often kajmak; a portion is five or ten pieces. Pljeskavica is the same mince as one big patty. A grill house does both far better than a restaurant terrace, and it is hard to spend much money on either.

Breakfast, and coffee that takes an hour

Hotel buffets aside, the local breakfast is bought at a pekara (bakery): burek or another coiled pita filled with cheese, meat, spinach or potato, eaten standing up with a bottle of drinking yoghurt. Like ćevapi it is Balkan rather than strictly Montenegrin, but it is the real local breakfast, and it costs about as much as a coffee.

Speaking of which: coffee here is a social occasion rather than a caffeine delivery system. A domaća kafa is Turkish-style, served in a small copper pot with a glass of water, and it is meant to be nursed for the best part of an hour. Nobody will hurry you out of the chair, in a cafe or a konoba.

The coast

Down on the water the cooking turns Venetian: olive oil, garlic, white wine, a little parsley and whatever came off the boat that morning. The trick everywhere is the same - keep it simple and buy it fresh - which is exactly why a mediocre kitchen cannot hide.

12. Buzara. Both a method and a sauce: mussels, prawns, clams or squid simmered in white wine, garlic, olive oil, parsley and a little breadcrumb until the liquid reduces into a broth you mop up with bread. There is no onion in it. Ask for bijela (white, no tomato) or crvena (red, with tomato). Mussel buzara is the everyday version and prawn buzara the treat; both swing in price with season and town, so read the menu rather than a blog.

13. Crni rižot. Black risotto, coloured and flavoured with cuttlefish ink. Jet black, glossy, gently briny, and it will stain your teeth for the rest of the evening. Order it anyway, ideally at lunch.

14. Lignje na žaru and hobotnica salata. Grilled squid and octopus salad, the two dishes that tell you whether a coastal kitchen is any good. Squid should be charred outside and tender inside, dressed with nothing more than olive oil, garlic and parsley; octopus salad is boiled octopus with potato, onion, olive oil and vinegar, served cold. Whole fish, meanwhile, is sold by weight - the waiter brings the catch to the table, so agree the size and the price before it goes on the grill.

15. Ukljeva and krap from Lake Skadar. The third, quieter tradition: freshwater fish from the big lake on the Albanian border. Ukljeva is bleak, smoked and dried; krap is carp, smoked or fresh off the grill; pastrmka is trout. Eat it in the lake villages where the boats land rather than on the coast - our Lake Skadar guide covers getting there.

How to order without over-ordering

Portions here are generous and the prices are low enough that people order like tourists and then leave half of it. Two adults do well with one shared platter of pršut and cheese, one main from the grill or the sea, and bread - that is a full meal, and it is usually cheaper than two mains. Kačamak, popeci and anything ispod sača are a dinner in themselves; ordering a starter in front of them is optimism. The one thing to skip is the fish-by-weight “catch of the day” at any place with a laminated photo menu - that is exactly where a cheap country stops being cheap.

Timing matters too. The bell-baked dishes need hours, so ask about ispod sača when you walk past at lunchtime for a dinner booking. Bean stew, raštan and sarma are cold-weather cooking and taste best from October onwards, when the coast quietens down and konobas move back to what the family cooks for itself.

The bread basket is worth a look rather than a shrug: alongside plain wheat bread you will meet barley (ječmeni), rye (ražani) and cornbread (rumetinov), and the darker ones go far better with kajmak and cured meat than white bread does.

Sweets, and the word that gets you the good stuff

Puddings here are homely. Priganice are little fried dough puffs served hot with honey, cheese or jam, and they double as breakfast. Tulumba is a ridged fried pastry soaked in syrup; krempita is a custard slice with a bad haircut and a good flavour; baklava turns up with walnuts and sometimes raisins. None of them will surprise you, and all of them are better than the tiramisu on the same menu.

To drink, the shortlist is Vranac (the native red), Krstač (the native white, and genuinely rare), rakija in its various fruit forms, the bitter herbal pelinkovac, and Nikšićko beer. Non-drinkers should look for sok od šipka, syrup pressed from wild pomegranates. The wines get their own section in our what to eat in Montenegro guide.

One word does more work than any of this list: konoba. It means a family-run tavern, it is almost always where the real cooking happens, and the ones a few streets back from the seafront cook better and charge less than the terraces on the main square. Inland, the konoba is the only place you will find raštan, japraci and a proper kačamak. In Budva, our best restaurants guide sorts the konobas from the tourist traps, and the wider food section has our vetted picks by city.