Restaurant Rustic: Romanian Classics with a Modern Twist on the Edge of Iași
Romania is still a gastronomic puzzle for me, even after all these years. I like the look of Romanian cooking on a menu - I'm tempted by tochitură moldovenească, braised meat with cornmeal porridge, cheese and a fried egg, and by sarmale, meat rolls in cabbage or grape leaves. But what reads as poetry on paper tends to land like ballast on the plate: most of that glory is simply too heavy for me, so I take it in small doses.
Restaurant Rustic, the restaurant of the Bellaria hotel on the edge of Iași (also spelled Iasi), is the first place where a Romanian menu didn't bury me - they cook traditional Romanian dishes the old way here and bring them to the table with a lightness the name never promises.
A Peasant Name in a Four-Star Hotel
In Romanian, rustic means exactly what it means in English: rural, country, from the Latin rusticus. And it is also the least accurate word you could use for the place - no farmhouse parlor with pitchforks on the wall, but the restaurant of the four-star Bellaria hotel in the Bucium district, where Iași slowly thins out into vineyards. The hotel is the newest arrival on the site. According to the property's own history, a summer garden called Zahana ran here for half a century, known for dishes made to old recipes and for its house wine; a 1997 rebuild renamed it Onyx, and since 2008 the Bellaria has stood on the site. So the name doesn't lie about the cooking, only about the setting: the recipes stayed peasant, while the service moved up to hotel standard.
The Moldavian School and an 1841 Cookbook
Iași used to be the capital of the Principality of Moldavia, and Moldavian cooking - meaning the Romanian region of Moldavia, not the neighboring country - is still a distinct shade of Romanian cooking: soups soured with borș, a fermented wheat brew, plenty of cream, plenty of sweet pastries. Locals like to say it is the most delicate cooking in the whole country - and the people making that claim are, naturally, Moldavians. Still, there is something to it. It was in Iași that the first Romanian cookbook came out in 1841, "200 Proven Recipes" by the writers Costache Negruzzi and Mihail Kogălniceanu, who signed it with nothing but their initials. The catch is that the first Romanian cookbook didn't teach anyone to cook Romanian: it gathered recipes from Paris and Vienna and merely "Moldavianized" them for boyar tables. Today's wave of places putting peasant dishes back on the menu with a modern twist does exactly the opposite. Rustic is one of them, even if it is happy enough to call itself a traditional restaurant.
Cauldron Ribs and Two Rustics in One City
The menu is a parade of Moldavian classics. The tripe soup ciorbă de burtă is noticeably milder than the Czech version, the spices stepping back for cream (more in my piece on ciorbă soups); the meatball soup is listed as borș de perișoare, named after the ferment that sours it. The star, though, is the smoked pork ribs from the cauldron: country potatoes, the garlic sauce mujdei with cream and dill - a combination in which any Czech will recognize the flavor base of the creamy dill sauce we make for Sunday lunch back home, except that here it comes with 600 grams of meat on the plate instead of an egg. For dessert there are papanași with homemade jam and cream. Just don't mix the places up: there are two restaurants called Rustic in Iași and they have nothing to do with each other, so it is better to tell your taxi driver the Bellaria hotel than the name on the sign.
Out to the Edge of Town for Ribs
Rustic wasn't a chance find - along with the Beraria Veche beer house, it was one of the Iași addresses I had written down in advance, and I went there on purpose: it sits off to one side, where the city runs out along the road to Bucium, so without a car you are left with a taxi - a cheap one, at least. The detour paid off fast. The staff speak fluent English, the food comes out briskly, and in good weather you sit on the terrace. Smoked pork ribs with country potatoes, cream and dill: the meat tender, juicy, coming off the bone without a fight. I have tried plenty here over time, from the tripe soup to papanași, and everything held up. The portion of ribs we drove right across Iași for came to about 10 EUR.
Restaurant Rustic
