Situated on one of the most prestigious streets of Sofia is a place called The Old Lady (“Старата Госпожа” in Bulgarian). It is one of the many restaurants in the city fostering the recently emerging brunch culture in Bulgaria.
When you first enter the joint, you feel the trendy atmosphere coming from the interior design. Although the place is quite small, the tall ceiling makes it seem a lot more spacious than it actually is. The kitchen, situated on a second floor and right above the bar, can be seen through a window wall, which definitely gives a lot more openness and honest feeling to the cooking process. The interior walls are decorated with beer and wine bottles on one side and hip posters on the other, which combined with the laid-back approach to the menu, appealed to younger customers (as evidently by the crowd when we visited).
When looking through the menu, you can easily see that eggs are a prominent item there, featured in a few different styles of Eggs Benedict, scrambled eggs and omelettes. You can also find some of the usual international brunch dishes consisting of bread, butter, jam, cold cuts and again eggs. For a brunch that is more on the sweet side, you can order yourself some french toast, waffles or a portion of “buhti” (a typical Bulgarian weekend meal). For the later hours of the day, there’s also sandwiches and burgers.
We ordered a cappuccino and a flat white coffee. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they use “Dabov” coffee as it is one of my favorite local brands. During our visit, we picked “Italian breakfast” for me, Eggs Benedict for Nadia and the “buhti made according to grandma’s recipe”. After a long wait (enough for me to drink my whole coffee), the food was served. The “Italian breakfast” portion did not impress with its size and the taste was the regular that you would expect from a few slices of italian ham, jam and scrambled eggs. The Eggs Benedict did indeed look better - they had colourful ingredients and smooth Hollandaise sauce, although the poached eggs were a little overcooked according to Nadia. The “buhti” were fried perfectly and we both liked them.
Overall, the experience and the food at The Old Lady was not as good as we expected. The prices were high for the type of dishes offered and the taste didn’t add up to them quite well. Although our first impressions of the place are not so good, I think that The Old Lady deserves a second visit, hopefully with a better experience.
