Shepherd's Lunch

A couple of weeks ago, in my neverending quest to put up numbers, I decided to try and find a restaurant in my neighbourhood that a colleague had recommended. It's about a twenty minute walk from my house, and I found it easily enough, but right across the street was something even more intriguing.

It looked like a fast food restaurant, but there were no customers and "Odmor" in the title means rest or vacation in Macedonian, and the building and staff looked like they were selling country getaways. And the menu was in cursive, which I cannot really read.

I noted that the menu, where everything seemed to start with "chobanski" (??) mentioned a website and I enlisted Google translate to help me out when I returned. Aha! "Shepherd's Break" is the translation and all of those "chobanskis" on the menu were signalling that the stews, sandwiches and beans were just like the real sheep herders eat in the heartland.

I returned the following Saturday, having already selected the "rolled lamb sandwich with cheese" from the online menu. I ordered it at the window, and the girl, who reminds me of Judge Reinhold after he was fired from All American Burger and gets the job at the seafood restaurant where he has to dress like a pirate, asked me if I wanted a prilog.

No thank you. What's a prilog? Turns out it's what you add to a sandwich (not as I had thought, fries, or some other accompaniment). So I don't know what else I might have put on it, but I do know that the lamb and white cheese on a bun was pretty much exactly as advertised.

I took my bag to the park and sat down on a bench. The sandwich didn't exactly rock my world, and, in fact, it was kind of boring. The bread was a little chewy (and there was a lot of it) and the lamb slice was also, as well as tasting a little processed.

Not a great lunch. But not a bad subject for a blog post. My two regular readers may remember that I made the opposite mistake almost a year ago when I asked for "everything" on my first pljeskavica. That mistake turned out a little better, but it's hard to draw any lessons from the dataset.