THE FOOD
During our stay, we had many occasion to taste various food.
Foodwise, you can have a really great value for your money in Romania. There are a few nice places in Galati that cook decent pizzas and pasta, and for about 6,90€ you can have a good dish and a pint of Romanian beer. We never had a really good dessert in any restaurant tho.
There are, of course, some fast-foods like Passage where you can get a triple schnitzel tacos for 2,20€, but if you want to go extra cheap there’s nothing better than the university canteen; You can have a schnitzel with some beans and bread for 0,70€ and it is rather good. If you are not that hungry have a soup and some bread for 0,45€. The only downsides are that it is only open for lunch and not on weekends.
If you feel like having a taste of typical Romanian food, the best way is, of course, to be invited at locals. We had the chance to taste a home-made chicken soup at a young Romanian’s place. The guy spent a few month in France so we were able to communicate this way, his mom was really kind and happy to invite us. Some typical dishes you can find are mamaliga (like a corn polenta), sarmale (grounded meat with spices surrounded with vine or cabbage leafs), sour and garlic soup are also very common.
That being said, the most Romanian dish to taste are Mitch. They are like sausage-shaped ground meat with spices, grilled on a barbecue. You eat them with some honey-flavored mustard and they are really good. You can find them in a lot of places and they are about 0.45€ each, usually 2-4 are enough to fill you up. Luckily, our friend Mara invited us to a barbecue at her place. Her mom and her had prepared appetizers made of hand picked Romanian cheeses along with a really good mashed eggplant tapenade. For the main course her dad had grilled mitch from the best butcher in town, a must-have if you are in Galati. We ate these with some French baguette we had found, and he served us home-made wine from the countryside, along with a cauliflower drink he made himself. We ended the meal with a cherry cake from Mara’s grandmother, and all that was the best meal we had during our whole stay.
Even tho the restaurants are really cheap in Romania we had to eat self cooked dinner as well. We tried to come as close as we could to the tastes of home, because we missed some of the dishes we were used to. French cheese is what I missed the most. We tried what we could to find home-like cheese, but the closest we came to it was low-grade french cheese that is 3 times the price of every other cheese in the store. We still had to have some, because pasta without grated cheese are really not the same.
