Croatia Diaries: Somebody Feed Tom
Encountering invertebrates in Phil Rosenthal's Dubrovnik
If you look up the entry for octopus on Wikipedia, as I sometimes do on a particularly slow afternoon, you’ll find that it tells you that octopuses are “among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates.” They also have “a complex nervous system” and “excellent sight.” What Wikipedia will not tell you, but that I am here to stress, is that they are very tasty.
They’re very tasty in a burger, at least, and particularly when eaten at Barba, a seafood restaurant that sits on a side street off Dubrovnik’s main drag Stradun. It’s seafood but not stuffy or expensive. Unlike most of Dubrovnik’s old town restaurants, whose food prices are so high you’ll need to re-mortgage your house and adjust your cholesterol medication once you’ve eaten there, Barba keeps their prices down while having some of the best food in the city.
This is even more admirable considering their recent publicity. Much to my considerable disappointment and despite many strongly worded letters, emails, and phone calls, Netflix have not yet given me my own food and travel show. Because of this, I spend more time than is healthy watching Somebody Feed Phil, a food and travel show I would have made had Phil Rosenthal (comedian and writer of such TV favourites as Everybody Loves Raymond) not got there first. It’s purely a question of timing.
In his most recent season he visits Croatia, and scoffs an octopus burger standing at the window of Barba.
I didn’t realise this until I sat in said window. As I paid for my burger at the counter the proprietor said yes, they were the octopus burger place from Somebody Feed Phil, and asked, did I recognise her?
Yes, of course, I mumbled. I mumbled this because it was a lie. I may be a travel blogger and a history graduate, but my research of any new city I arrive in tends to consist of walking around the centre for a bit before I settle on a restaurant that won’t swindle or poison me.
The eureka moment when I realised that I had quite by accident ticked off a place and experience on my Dubrovnik bucket list came when I sat at the table looking out the very window that Phil had stood outside eating his burger. I tucked into mine plotting his downfall and my eventual rise to Netflix’s go-to food and travel guy.
So what does an octopus burger taste like exactly? Well I’m no Jay Rayner or Anthony Bourdain and I’m certainly no Nigella, so I’ll sum it up like this: an octopus burger tastes like a posh fish finger sandwich.
Given that octopus and fish aren’t exactly distant cousins, this isn’t exactly ground-breaking information, I admit. But look, some of you now have a great recommendation of what to eat in Dubrovnik and some of you are vegetarians.
My recommendation for the vegetarians amongst my readers - apart from to keep your judgement to yourselves - is to bear in mind that in my experience, the people of the Balkans tend to view vegetables as a dietary suggestion rather than a requirement. A suggestion that tends to be ignored.
In conclusion then, an octopus burger is quite like a fish finger sandwich, but one done very well at Barba. The bun is chewy and delicious and there’s even salad, sweet, rare salad in the Balkans, cradling next to the fish patty. It also costs around 10 euro, which would usually just about stretch to a banana in Dubrovnik.
And if you don’t want to listen to me, listen to Phil Rosenthal. Netflix certainly do.
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I loved Dubrovnik, though I’ve never stumbled upon the octopus burger place. But I fondly remember my visit to Dubrovnik was the first time I tried bibimbap, a Korean dish made with rice and beef and a ton of veggies and topped with hot salsa. It’s become one of my favourite dishes ever.
I had Octopus in Morocco. A fine dining experience where I found the texture quite meat like. Mine didn't have a lot of flavour. Maybe I would enjoy a burger more. Croatia is on my bucket list, having visited Yugoslavia in the 80's. I thought it was beautiful.