Food in the Tatras is Slovak and pastoral: bryndza-cheese dumplings, cabbage soup, dumplings filled with sheep's cheese, and sheep's-milk cheeses. The best meals are found at mountain sheep farms and 'koliba' huts below the peaks — a koliba is a wooden tavern with a hearth in the middle where food is grilled. Mountain huts cook simple, cheap food, typically soup, tea with rum, and cake. In the villages there are hotel restaurants, pizzerias and bakeries; Poprad has supermarkets stocked with everything for a hike. At the huts, payment is usually in cash — cards aren't accepted everywhere.
Bryndzové halušky
The national dish: potato dumplings with sheep's-milk bryndza cheese and fried bacon. You can tell a good place by the bryndza being salty and tangy, not sweet — the sweet kind is what supermarkets sell. A portion is hearty and costs around eight to twelve euros.
Kapustnica
A cabbage soup with smoked meat, sausage, dried mushrooms and plums, mellowed with cream. It's traditionally made at Christmas, but pubs serve it year-round, and it doesn't need to be ordered as a starter before halušky — it's a meal in itself.
Bryndzové pirohy
Dumplings filled with bryndza cheese and potato, topped with bacon and sour cream. A heartier, less salty alternative to halušky, a good choice for anyone who finds plain bryndza too sharp.
Sheep's-milk cheeses and žinčica
Bryndza, oštiepok, korbáčiky and parenica are various forms of sheep's-milk cheese, with oštiepok often smoked. Žinčica is the tangy whey left over from making bryndza, drunk cold — the most typical drink of Slovak mountain sheep farms.
Garlic soup in bread
A garlic soup with cheese served in a hollowed-out loaf of bread, which is eaten along with the soup at the end. It's the classic mountain-hut lunch and costs around six euros.
Tea with rum
Every mountain hut sells tea with Czech-style rum, and guests choose their own ratio. It warms you up, but on the way back down it's better to stick to plain tea.
Lokše
Thin flatbreads made from boiled potatoes, dry-fried and filled with goose pâté, poppy seed or plum jam. They accompany goose feasts in autumn; in Bratislava they're also sold as street food at markets.
Malokarpatské wine and Kofola
Slovakia makes white wines from the Malé Karpaty hills just outside Bratislava — Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling, Devín. Kofola is the national cola made from herbal syrup; on tap from a barrel it tastes different from the bottled version and costs around a euro and a half.
