The Adriatic Highway—or Jadranska Magistrala—parallels Croatia’s mainland coast. The road forms the western edge of the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe and runs 400 miles from the country’s Dalmatian region, in the south, to the Istrian Peninsula, near Italy, in the north. Along the way, it passes seaside towns laid out by the Romans two millennia ago. It rolls though villages anchored by church bell towers and encircled by olive-grove aprons. During harvest season, you can see men and women filling buckets with plump red grapes from their steep hillside vineyards. Leathery brown from the sun, they dab sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs as you speed by. Jagged limestone cliffs shadow the motorway from the east. To the west, a thin guardrail separates the blacktop from a sheer drop into the royal-blue sea studded by some 1,200 islands strewn across the horizon.
More than just a highway, the Jadranska Magistrala, technically the E65, is a cultural and gourmet corridor. The two-laner is a progressive dinner for visitors lucky enough to know where to discover its culinary treasures. A smorgasbord of red and white wine, piquant olive oil, wind-dried prosciutto, dense cheese brimming with the taste of herb-filled pastures, fist-sized truffles and direct-from-the-sea oysters are ready to be toasted, tasted, sucked, shucked or mopped up with pieces of fresh, warm bread.
In mid-autumn I set off from Dubrovnik, near the Croatia’s southern tip, determined to eat my way across the country. Though not a foodie, I have worked in and traveled across Croatia many times. And one of the first things a visitor to this small seaside nation learns is that Croats truly understand food. They have relationships with the farmers in the market. They know the days of the week when the best vegetables and cuts of meat arrive. Croatians always seem to have an uncle who makes wine on an ancestral island plot. You want fresh olive oil or truffles or that perfect liqueur? They know a guy … and that guy is likely their father. A typical citizen would just as well not eat as eat tasteless, packaged dishes.
Before my trip, I asked a man working in one of the country’s many outdoor green markets why even someone with my limited culinary sensibilities could sense something special about Croatia’s offerings. He looked at me and smiled the way Europeans often do when confronted by such a question from an American.
“Look,” he said, his stubby fingers weighing out radishes on an old-fashioned scale balanced by individual, handheld weights. “What you call organic, we just call food. We make simple things. But the ingredients are all of the top quality.”
Outdoor green market in Zagreb, Croatia Photo via Flickr/Ramón
The Pelješac Peninsula
About an hour north of Dubrovnik, I took a left off the highway and onto the Pelješac Peninsula, which is famous for red wine and oysters. Pelješac is a microcosm of Croatia. Surrounded by sea and with a spine of rolling hills, it was colonized by the Greeks and Romans, who realized its strategic position—both gastronomically and militarily. Ancient, stone-block churches stand guard above valleys, where families work the same land they’ve occupied for centuries.
What you call organic, we just call food. We make simple things. But the ingredients are all of the top quality.
Driving along the 44-mile peninsula in the autumn—on one of the many wine roads here—means continuously waiting behind donkeys loaded with bouncing baskets of the region’s prevalent red-wine grapes, which are ancient relatives of California’s zinfandel variety, known as plavac mali. Almost as soon as I passed one donkey and its owner, who would grin and tip his straw hat, I was stuck again, this time behind a go-cart-like tractor overflowing with more of the valuable produce. At regular intervals, red-tile-roofed houses advertised bottles of vino for sale in words scrawled on wood—the same way roadside placards in my home state of Georgia hawk “boiled peanuts.”
