Albania’s food revolution: unique ingredients, lost wines and returning chefs put country on the culinary map

From 1945 to 1991 Albania was the Mediterranean’s hermit kingdom. After the second world war, the country, led by Enver Hoxha, became a hardline communist state. His goal was for the country to be completely self-sufficient – all food was rationed, collectivised and canned. Fishing was discouraged because boats were considered a way to escape. Cookbooks were burnt and traditional recipes were lost. Its coastline’s juicy Adriatic prawns – beloved in neighbouring Italy and Greece – were presumed to be inedible and were fed instead to pigs. Stewed meat bones with tinned pears and grain gruel would have been considered a luxury.

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But a few young Albanian chefs are returning home after years of cooking at some of the world’s top restaurants. They’ve come back to reinvent Albanian cuisine, taking what they’ve learned abroad and using the fabulous indigenous ingredients, they are making what is one of Europe’s most inventive culinary scenes.

“We are trying to preach the ingredients forgotten by modern society,” explains Albania’s most celebrated chef, Bledar Kola. The chef is only 33, and most recently worked in Copenhagen’s two-Michelin-star Noma. “Take this kulumri,” he says, holding up a wild sour plum native to Albania. “It’s sensationally tasty but nobody could remember how to cook it.”

Bledar and I are drinking pressed cherry juice in his new slow food restaurant, Mullixhiu, in the buzzing Albanian capital of Tirana. He hands me a piece of cow’s cheese – mishavinë. It’s gooey and has a beefy tang, like eating an animal in pasture; a bovine toffee you won’t find anywhere else.

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“Albania doesn’t produce cars or watches,” says Kola. “All we have is this four-seasons-in-a-day topography.”

That means 350km of sun-kissed shores with hillside vineyards that date back to the Roman Empire and Alpine mountains that rival Switzerland – for both grazing and skiing. The only trick is trying to fit all the flavours onto one plate.

That is why Kola, who says he came home “to challenge the global dictatorship of French cuisine”, is making me his eight-course tasting menu, which costs only €15 (Albania is categorically the cheapest country in Europe).