Ciorbă, sausage with stewed cabbage and bread still warmWatermelon juice, pressed to order and poured with the froth still on itThe dining room — round tables, the toilets off the far wallA table laid for ten, the window onto the street behind itCoffee, in a plain white cupThe drinks fridge — Ciucaș and Timișoreana, energy drinks, Coca-Cola and Fanta
The kitchen at the Landhaus Apartments, where Mr Rai and his team cook Romanian home food to order. Ciorbă with the sourness pitched exactly right. Sausage with stewed cabbage. Bread still warm enough to steam when you tear it. Nothing has been sitting under a lamp, because nothing was made before you asked for it. Not a restaurant in the tourist sense — no menu on a stand, no turnaround time, no second sitting waiting for your table. You say what you want and roughly when, and it is cooked for you. Fresh watermelon juice is pressed to order, whole fruit into the blender while you wait. You eat in a tiled dining room of round tables with skirted cloths, seating eight or ten to a table, with its own toilets off it. Beer, energy drinks and soft drinks are in the fridge by the door.
My verdict, and it is not a close call
This is the best food I have eaten in this city. Not the best home cooking, not the best value — the best, full stop. Mr Rai and his team will get you hooked, and once you have eaten here twice the rest of Craiova’s dining rooms start to look like places that reheat things. There is no next-best I would send you to instead. If what you want is real food made by people who actually care whether you finish the plate, this is not one option among several. It is the reason to book the apartment. Everything else on this page is information. This is a recommendation, and it is mine.
That bread that steams when you tear it is not delivered. It is mixed, shaped and proved in the kitchen behind the dining room — trays of dough rounds resting on the steel before they go in the oven — and baked in the same building you eat in. That is why it arrives warm rather than warmed up, and why the timing of your meal is the timing of the bake.
Dough rounds proving on the trays in the Landhaus kitchen, before the oven
