Staria Chinar: Bulgarian Cooking Where Varna's Locals Eat
One piece of travel wisdom says you should keep switching restaurants, or else you only ever taste a place from a single chair. In Varna - and pretty much everywhere else - I ignored it completely: I ate at the same chain almost every time and the only thing I changed was the branch.
Staria Chinar (in Bulgarian: Стария чинар) is a chain of restaurants serving Bulgarian cuisine with five branches in Varna alone - everything comes off a charcoal grill, the cured meats are aged in the restaurant's own curing room, and the prices are set for locals, not tourists.
A Name You Can Touch
Restaurants usually take their name from the founder or from whatever you can see out of the window. Staria Chinar means old plane tree, and it is more of an address than a metaphor: the chain's first restaurant still stands under a real tree roughly a hundred years old. The chain has been cooking for over twenty years - it has worked the anniversary right into the logo on the menu - and Bulgarian review sites describe it as a place "for several generations". Its own website doesn't give away the exact founding year; here it's apparently enough to carry your age in your name.
Five Branches, One Without Tourists
I started at the branch on Preslav Street, which was literally around the corner from where I was staying - it sits in a two-story house from the beginning of the last century and of all five it's the closest to the tourist routes. Then I stumbled on the branch on Tsaribrod Street and stayed there. Delivery orders from the whole neighborhood run through it, so the room is mostly locals - across all my visits I never ran into another foreigner. They do have an English menu, I never needed a reservation, and although the staff mostly don't speak English, we always managed in the end. If you want Varna without tourists, this is where you'll find it.
What's Cooking Under the Plane Tree
The kitchen is built around the grill. Staria Chinar is no mehana, though - the folk tavern with a fireplace, painted pottery and a folk band that Bulgaria usually wheels out to sell tradition. It's an ordinary modern restaurant that keeps its tradition on the plate instead of in the scenery. Bulgarians call the grill skara, and a platter that brings several kinds of meat together at once mešana skara - mixed grill. It isn't a Bulgarian invention but something the whole Balkans shares: Serbia and North Macedonia serve mešano meso, Romania grătar mixt, and nobody argues about the origin as long as the meat is smoking. Anyone who has ever stood over a weekend grill back home in Czechia knows the same principle: when you can't choose between sausage and pork neck, you cook both. The meat here comes with lutenica, a spread of roasted peppers and tomatoes, and new potatoes with butter, garlic and dill - a nationwide Bulgarian classic, not some chef's idea. I also tried the grilled pork ear here, which I've written about separately.
Half a Kilo of Meat on Tsaribrod Street
My first meal at Staria Chinar was a lesson in translation: the English menu promised meatballs, and what landed on the table were potato balls, stuffed with smoked kaškaval and Parmesan. The Bulgarian original calls them "Chinar balls" - the restaurant put its own name on them, because this is no traditional recipe but its own party piece. The way they looked completely won me over - I hadn't expected anything like it there - and the taste was every bit as good as the way they looked. For 13.60 BGN (6.40 EUR) I'd order them again any day.
The high point, though, was the "butcher's board": a pork skewer, homemade sausage, ribs and a steak, with a bowl of lutenica alongside. The steak was unbelievably tender and juicy, beautifully seasoned - one of the best I've ever eaten. Half a kilo of meat came to roughly 24.65 BGN (11.60 EUR), the new potatoes to another 6.40 BGN (3 EUR); there was no finishing it in one sitting and part of it went home with me.
Staria Chinar
