Gude

A friend brought Patso here the first time. He lives abroad and misses the food he grew up on, so Gude is where he eats when he is in Sofia. He compared it to sitting under the grape vines at his grandmother's house. We started with the house salad. Bite-sized tomatoes and cucumbers, white cow cheese, whole peppers roasted and marinated in the kitchen. Patso kept using the word simple, and he meant it as praise. A scoop of Bulgarian curd cheese with parsley came on the same plate. It turned out to be what the tsiganska banitsa had been waiting for. The hummus came on the recommendation of the friend who first brought Patso. Boyan, the owner, makes it himself, and Nedi told us no two batches taste alike. Ours had sumac in it, sharp against the nuttiness of the chickpeas. Then the grill. Boneless pork ribs, nadenitsa, kebapcheta. The ribs and kebapcheta were tender, the meat fresh, from a butcher nearby. The nadenitsa was the best of the three. Whole chunks of meat still visible in the cut. The spicing was what separates these plates from other grills around. Each came with a roasted pepper and house potato chips under grated cheese. We ordered a second plate of the chips with sharena sol. A spice bomb. Dessert was a plain chocolate cake, fudgy and dense without tipping sweet. Yet both of us wished for biskvitena cake, which would have closed the loop on the whole evening. We finished on something not on the menu at all. A smoky spoonful of baba ghanoush Nedi had made for the staff out of two eggplants Boyan carried in earlier that day. Gude is nested behind the tracks of tram number five, at the roundabout where the trams used to turn before the new lines went in. Patso said it caught him off guard the first time, and I see why. No two plates match. No two forks match. The furniture comes from thrift stores, every table has its own potted plant, and the candles have been burning long enough to build wax down their own sides. Rustic, Patso called it. Even the water arrives in vintage glass bottles from a brand that stopped production years ago.