Visiting Bosnia via St. Louis
A burgeoning community in the Gateway City is the place to find lepini, cevapi and other Bosnian treats
- By Aaron Kagan
- Smithsonian.com, April 05, 2011, Subscribe
St. Louis, MO - Driving down Gravois Avenue can be geographically disorienting. The same road takes you past Grant’s Farm, an Anheuser-Busch property where a herd of iconic Clydesdales entertains visitors, and the Bevo Mill neighborhood, where you’ll note a high concentration of bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants and corner stores advertising European goods. You are now in Little Bosnia, where you cannot leave hungry.
Visit any one of the many Bosnian eateries in St. Louis, and you will find no shortage of affordable, satisfying, authentic fare. You will be stuffed with homemade breads, sausages and pastries topped off with a strong cup of Turkish coffee or perhaps a snort of slivovitz, a plum brandy that is the Bosnian spirit of choice.
The Bosnian community of St. Louis was established in the wake of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s when the U.S. government and the city’s International Institute helped place refugees in the southern part of the city. Subsequent waves of immigrants followed, attracted by the presence of friends and family, some of whom had set up shop cooking and serving traditional foods.
What exactly is Bosnian cuisine? “If you just consider the geographical location, then you probably would have a nice guess,” says Azra Blazevic, a research lab supervisor at Saint Louis University (SLU) who left Bosnia in 1992. (Note: Though the country’s official name is Bosnia and Herzegovina, immigrants often refer to it simply as “Bosnia.”) Blazevic says Bosnian fare is an amalgam of regional influences including Greek, Italian and Middle Eastern. “But we were never so rich to adopt all these expensive types of spices, and so our cuisine is pretty much more bland than Middle Eastern cuisine,” she says. “We probably try to compensate for it by making very elaborate dishes. A Bosnian pita is phyllo dough filled with a lot of different stuff in it. That’s a dish that you cannot make in 15 minutes.”
Ajlina Karamehic-Muratovic did not hesitate when asked to describe Bosnian fare. “I would say bread is number one,” she said. Originally from the town of Visoko, near Sarajevo, Karamehic-Muratovic also works at SLU, teaching in the department of sociology and criminal justice. To illustrate her point, she cited a Bosnian maxim: “We don’t even eat bread without bread.” She says this explains the number of bakeries in Little Bosnia, such as one called ASW, where many families buy fresh bread daily. The prevalence of bread is one of the reasons that reviews of Bosnian restaurants favor the adjective “hearty.”
Bread figures prominently in Bosnian meals, as in the chewy, mild sourdough flatbread called lepini (or lepinji or lepinja). At the restaurant Bosna Gold, bread arrives both before the meal and as a substantial part of many entrees. The small link sausages called cevapi are served between enormous golden disks of lepini that are themselves almost too much to eat.
Berix Coffee & Deli is an excellent place to sample a wide array of Bosnian baked goods both sweet and savory. The pastry cases at both Berix locations—there is one in Little Bosnia and one farther out in the suburbs—are full of confections such as baklava and cupavci, a sponge cake filled with custard and dusted with shredded coconut. Its tulumba is similar in appearance to a stubby churro, and though light as a zephyr, drips with syrup. A bite of airy tulumba and a sip of thick, black Turkish coffee are a blissful yin and yang.
“One of the biggest and most important things in the Bosnian culture is Turkish coffee,” says Karamehic-Muratovic. “We have Turkish coffee maybe three to four times a day, but it’s not like in the U.S. where you use coffee to wake up. We use coffee to socialize,” she says, adding that a single small serving may be nursed for 15 or 20 minutes. The Turkish coffee at Berix is served in an ornate set that suggests a ritual rather than a quick jolt. Why Turkish coffee in a Bosnian restaurant? A few centuries of Ottoman rule can have that effect.
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Comments (3)
I had no idea that Indianapolis had several Bosnian eateries. Would any of recommend a few places for this potential visitor from Ohio? Thank you!
Posted by Suleman Sheikh on February 11,2013 | 11:55 AM
=) I have fallen in love with the Bosnian community. They're wonderful people. Great food and brilliant music!
Posted by Renee on February 16,2012 | 12:12 AM
We have a lot of Bosnians in Indianapolis and the food is amazing.
Posted by ladyga on December 31,2011 | 11:30 PM