I’m not the kind of person who goes around taking photos of every meal I eat to later share with uninterested friends, so I hope you’ll indulge me this one time. I think it will be worth it because this is a story of one of the more memorable restaurants Corie and I have been to.
If I told you the name of the restaurant is ?, I’m sure you’d ask me when Corie and I became so hip and cool that we started eating at restaurants identified by a symbol and not the usual spelled-out-with-letters kind of place. Well, rest assured, the two of us are still somewhere on the lower, lower end of the hip and cool scale as the day before we dined at ?. That’s because the restaurant has been known to locals as ? shortly after it opened its doors in 1878 and is not some hot new restaurant full of people who bounced for someplace lit.*
I’m a sucker for a good story, so I knew ?, Belgrade’s oldest operating restaurant, would have a few, beginning with its unusual name.
? is located across the street from St. Michael’s Cathedral, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. The story goes that the cathedral's priests couldn’t stand the idea of a drinking establishment across the street from where people gathered to pray, so they snuck out one night to paint over the restaurant’s sign.
Like most stories that have evolved into legend, this narrative is false. The real story, according to historian David A. Norris, is much better.
Fortunately for our tale, angry priests still have something to do with the unusual name. When ? first opened, it was called At the Shepherd’s, an innocuous name that likely wouldn’t have gone down in history. The owner, Ećim-Toma eventually changed the restaurant’s name to At the Cathedral before he sold the establishment to Ivan Pavlović.
In addition to the typical bar and restaurant fare, Ivan decided with a name like At the Cathedral, extra money could be made. So he started selling cheap knockoffs of priest’s robes and other church items. Today, no one really knows what irritated the priests more, the booze or the inferior religious items Ivan hawked. The priests threatened legal action, insisting Ivan change the restaurant’s name.
Since a lawsuit has less severe but more pressing consequences than eternal damnation, Ivan obliged and painted the question mark on the sign, a temporary solution until everything blew over and a new name could be figured out. As you might have guessed by now, the question mark stuck.
Corie and I didn’t know what to expect when we walked to ? for lunch one day. At the very least, we could tell people we ate at ? and start a conversation along the lines of an Abbot and Costello routine. Our waiter, Joc, greeted us at the front door with an enthusiastic “My friends” before directing us to a table where we could people watch over lunch. I ordered the sarma od domaćeg kiselog kupusa–cabbage rolls filled with meat, rice and carrots– while Corie landed on the leskovački ćevapi na žaru, a meatball dish spiced with a generous amount of paprika and onion.
Our worry that we might have been eating at a tourist trap was quickly dispelled as Joc greeted most of the incoming diners by name, conversing with them in any one of the six languages he knew.
Now I’m not much of an eloquent food critic, so I’ll sum up the flavors of our meal with a simple “dang!” It’s now on our list of must-return-to restaurants.
After we finished our meal, I asked Joc if I could take his photo. He enthusiastically agreed, but wanted to show me a photo hanging on the restaurant wall, a farmer herding his pigs down the street outside. Joc excitedly told me the photo was taken 100 years ago. He directed me to follow him out to the street, wanting to show me that, aside from the row of parked cars replacing the farmer with his pigs, nothing in the photo had changed.
I understood his enthusiasm. In a world where change is constant, when new things come and go, there’s a solace that comes with the longevity that comes when irritated priests and a snarky restauranteur create something special together.
* I've been told by the Internet that this is the hip way of saying "people who left one place to go somewhere more exciting." Not having teen agers under our roof I, of course, have no way of verifying this.
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