I’ve always loved the story of the Michelin star system. It began as a clever trick by a tire company, which tells you almost everything you need to know about human civilization: we will travel absurd distances if someone tells us the food is good enough. One star means, if you happen to be nearby, you should stop in. Two stars mean, you really ought to plan a trip. Three stars mean, pack your bags, cancel your dentist appointment, and fly halfway across the globe just to sit in a room where a man in white gloves serves you a foam that tastes like sadness and anchovies.
This makes sense in Paris. It makes sense in Tokyo. But what happens when you apply this logic to Bulgaria?
The average Western traveler, when told to visit Bulgaria, squints in confusion, as if you’ve just mentioned a distant moon that might or might not support life. Bulgaria, to most, is not a destination; it’s a question mark. But that’s where the Michelin logic falls apart, because if Michelin is about perfection, Bulgaria is about everything else: chaos, stubbornness, absurdity, survival, and moments so startlingly human that perfection feels irrelevant.
You came anyway. You ignored the warnings whispered by travel blogs and the silence of the tourist brochures, drawn by the stubborn whisper that this is, after all, Europe's oldest continuously named country. Two millennia of history—that weight must land somewhere. Yet, that ancient pedigree does not smooth the edges of the present. Instead, it seems to have granted the country the right to be entirely unimpressed by you, your comfort, or your expectations.
And so you landed in Sofia. The plane bumps down on the tarmac with all the grace of a shopping cart hitting a curb. The airport feels like it was built by someone who wanted to remind you that travel should be slightly humiliating. The signage is indecipherable, the baggage carousel makes noises that suggest mechanical despair, and the man at passport control regards you as if you’ve arrived with the sole purpose of wasting his afternoon. The taxi driver greets you with a glare that suggests you’ve personally ruined his evening, and the ride into the city is less “transportation” than an ongoing negotiation with gravity. By the time you reach your hotel, you’re already composing an email to yourself titled “Never Again.”
And then hunger sets in. Hunger is democratic: it overrules your doubts, overrides your self-pity, insists on being addressed. Sooner or later, you follow a side street, chasing the faint smell of dill and smoke, and you stumble on a door leading down into a basement. There’s no sign outside, just the suggestion that if you go in, something will happen. Inside: no menu, no English, no ceremony. Just a woman with a ladle, who serves you soup with the quiet authority of someone who has seen empires rise and fall and doesn't need your approval. You take a spoonful. The broth is sharp, clean, undeniable. The napkin is thinner than your patience. The fluorescent light above you buzzes in protest. And yet—something happens. For reasons you cannot explain, life feels clearer, heavier, larger.
If Michelin had been born here, that would be one star.
Two stars mean a detour, and in Bulgaria, a detour always verges on the absurd. Someone whispers about banitsa — the cheese-filled pastry folded with time and stubbornness — and suddenly you’re on the road. Ryanair delays you, Frankfurt airport punishes you with a sausage that feels like revenge, and then the mountains swallow you whole. The GPS lies. Goats refuse to move. You stop at a roadside stand where a man in a vest offers you honey in reused Coca-Cola bottles, and somehow you buy three. An old Lada sputters past, its dashboard rattling like a typewriter reciting poetry it doesn't believe in. The detour becomes less a road trip and more a slow-motion collapse of your sense of order.
By the time you arrive at what looks like a barn abandoned sometime around 1982, you’re exhausted, irritable, and hungry enough to question your own sanity. But then the waiter sets down a glass of wine that tastes like petrol, memory, and destiny all at once. And then comes the banitsa: dense, warm, unapologetic. You bite into it, and in that instant every inconvenience — the flight, the drive, the goats, the honey in Coca-Cola bottles — feels inevitable, like the universe had conspired just to deliver you to that single mouthful of pastry.
That’s two stars. The detour was worth it.
And then there is the three-star moment. In France, it is foie gras. In Japan, wagyu. In Bulgaria, it is a pickle.
Yes, a cucumber in brine.
You plan your trip around it. You drive through mountain passes that look carved by giants in bad moods. You pass monasteries where monks in sandals sell wine strong enough to reset your memory. You stop in villages where old women in headscarves sit on benches, watching you with expressions that say: You are already part of our story, whether you like it or not. A chicken crosses the road with the bored confidence of someone who knows you'll stop anyway. Your car radio only finds folk songs and static.
At last, you arrive at a wooden table in a tavern that leans slightly to the left. The waiter—Nikolay, a man who looks like he has lived through three different currencies and at least two failed governments, who mentions his son moved to Germany—places the pickle before you.
You bite.
The crunch echoes inside you like a revelation. The vinegar rewires your neurons. The salt floods you with nostalgia for lives you never lived — childhoods in villages that never belonged to you, summers you didn’t have, winters you didn’t endure. For one impossible second, absurd and holy, everything makes sense.
That is three stars.
And yet Michelin never came. Which is precisely the point. Because Michelin measures perfection, but here perfection doesn’t exist. The real test of a Bulgarian meal is whether the table holds long enough to carry the food. Whether the rakia leaves you with half your enamel intact. Whether the chef storms out to argue politics with you between courses. None of this interrupts the experience — it is the experience.
Food in Bulgaria is never just taste. It is confrontation. It is survival. It is comedy. The salad is always tomatoes, cucumbers, and cheese, and to ask for something else is to misunderstand the entire country. The bread is dense enough to double as construction material. The wine is strong enough to dismantle your calendar. And every dish carries a reminder that perfection is not only unnecessary — it is a kind of lie.
Forget Michelin. Bulgaria has its own star system. One star if the waiter actually brings what you ordered. Two stars if the rakia doesn’t burn a hole through the tablecloth. Three stars if you wake up the next morning still in Bulgaria, not in another dimension.
So when someone brags about their three-star Parisian dinner, with foams and reductions and waiters who whisper like priests, you smile. You let them finish. And then you tell them about the time you flew to Bulgaria, ate soup in a basement, chased banitsa through goat-blocked mountain roads, bought honey in Coke bottles, dodged chickens in villages, and bit into a pickle that contained the meaning of life.
Because Michelin tells you where to find perfection. But Bulgaria proves that care and chaos together can be delicious.