The city that is not on the list
London. New York. Tokyo. Mexico City. These are the cities people name when they talk about bars. Belgrade is not on that list, and if you ask anyone in Belgrade about it, they will tell you the list is stupid and that they do not care about it anyway.
Belgrade has been a bar city for a long time. It has been a bar city through wars, through sanctions, through currency collapses, through governments that came and went faster than the hangovers they caused. Bars are not a luxury in Belgrade. Bars are infrastructure.
Rakija
If you are going to drink in Belgrade, you are going to drink rakija. It is a fruit brandy — plum, most commonly, but also apricot, quince, pear, grape, walnut, honey. It is not a cocktail ingredient. It is not a shot you do to be polite. It is the drink that Serbs have been making at home for centuries, in stills that sit in the back garden, and it is served at every meal and every celebration and every funeral and every Tuesday.
Good rakija is not rough. Bad rakija will remove the paint from a wall. You will be offered both, and you will not always know which is which until it is in your mouth. This is part of the game.
The old bars
Belgrade has two bar cultures sitting on top of each other. The old one is kafanas — traditional taverns where you eat grilled meat, listen to live music that is either folk or turbofolk depending on the night, and drink rakija and beer until the music stops. The kafana is not a trend. It is a thousand-year-old format, and it is not going anywhere.
The new one is the cocktail bars of Strahinjića Bana — the street the locals call Silicon Valley because it is where people go to spend money they do not have — and the quieter spots in Dorćol and Savamala. These bars are younger than most of their customers' parents. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are just expensive. The good ones are run by people who trained in London or Berlin and came back because they wanted to be in Belgrade. That is not sentimentality. That is a business decision that happens to also be a feeling.
The night is a country
Belgrade nightlife starts late and ends later. Nine is early. Midnight is when people start to arrive. Two in the morning is when the real conversation begins. Four is when you find the bakery. Six is when you finally go home, if you go home.
This is not a tourist thing. This is the actual rhythm of the city. People work in the morning. People sleep in the afternoon. People drink at night. They have been doing this for a long time and they are not going to stop because some article in a magazine says they should sleep more.
The bartender
A Belgrade bartender will not be quiet. A Belgrade bartender will not be loud. A Belgrade bartender will look at you, decide in three seconds what kind of person you are, and either serve you forever or serve you once and hope you leave.
There is no performance in it. There is no Tokyo precision and no Mexico City warmth. There is something else — a kind of blunt hospitality that says: you are here, so you may as well drink something good, and if you do not, that is your problem.
So what
If you ever go to Belgrade, do not go looking for the best cocktail bar. Go looking for the kafana. Order the rakija. Order the meat. Stay until the music stops. Then find the bakery.
That is Belgrade. Everything else is just the story people tell about it later.
