A Nod to Dubrovniks Fast Food Industry

Fast food in Dubrovnik centres around the concept of a fish sandwich, which is not as odd as it sounds. The fishing industry on the Dalmatian coast is in good shape, buckets of fresh catch arrive by the hour, all day, everyday and specialist seafood restaurants out number the meat serving places by at least 5 to 1. So the local fast food option is the fish sandwich, any kind of fish works: langoustines, mullet, sardines, sea bass, you name it the Croats love their fish. Said fish gets steamed and plonked between two slices of bread. Any kind of sauce or salad is simply not an option; that would be polluting the sandwich. Their bread is not unlike Turkish flat bread only not quite so soft, it’s more robust and dense and heavily salted. There is a small fish sandwich place hidden off the Stradun on Siroka worth a visit.

Ice cream is unsurprisingly everywhere given the heat, tourists and the huge Italian influences. Sladoledarna Dubrovnik is the best place to go and for the princely sum of 50p you can have yourself a large cone of dairy ice-cream, served to you by Dubrovnik’s Mr Tourist himself. He’s a local but seems to have acquired a few phrases of Irish Gaelic and an in depth knowledge of Glasgow’s sectarian divides, and that was just us, Lord knows what he says to the French.

Lastly worth a visit is the Panini shop next door to Katy O’Conners which is the Croat version of Subway. Your panini is filled with exactly what you want then melted conveyor belt style (although without any blaring trance music in the background and no one offers you a free cookie).

Pleasantly though even a walk outside the gates of the old town into the areas “out-of-bounds” to tourists reveals that this little corner of the Adriatic may as yet be untainted by McDonalds.