A CITY ON THE VERGE
BOJAN BOČVAROV had a secret. It was almost too much for the dimpled 39-year-old to bear as he motored up a narrow road on a leafy residential hillside in central Belgrade. He could have taken my wife, Rikki, and me anywhere. Having just landed, we were jet-lagged and famished, easy to please. But Bojan had something special in mind. “This is a very low-known restaurant,” he confided with a devilish smile.
We had good reason to trust him. As the executive chef of a prosperous international restaurant group, Bojan knew the food scene in his home city well. But it wasn’t always that way. He, like many his age, had fled the country in the late 1990s to escape nationalism, war, and the hard times that would follow.
He found work in fancy European kitchens and learned how to cook. A decade ago, he moved back home, joined the restaurant group, and soon was creating menus at Toro Latin GastroBar, a hip tapas spot on the banks of the Sava River in Belgrade, and Ambar, a popular Balkan restaurant in Washington, D.C., among other top-flight eateries. He and his colleagues took pride in exporting Serbian culture to the United States, while importing global cuisine to Serbia: Culinary cosmopolitanism felt like an antidote against the worst of their country’s past and a way
