Culinary North

Welcome dinner at a 1921 house

We’ll meet at our hotel beside Chișinău’s central park and walk to dinner at Dom 19:21, a restored 1921 house that cooks the way Moldovan families did a century ago — plăcinte, mămăligă and soups made to old recipes, served on embroidered tablecloths among heavy wooden dressers. At 19:21 every evening, the house pours tea. Then we stroll on for a nightcap at the Elvis taproom, which pours the “live” beer — no preservatives — that a family has brewed in the village of Puhoi since 1999, and sketch out the road north.

Hobbit houses & Roma feast

We leave Chișinău after breakfast for Clișova Nouă, where Ecaterina, a master weaver, has gathered old Bessarabian carpets into a museum and keeps the looms working. After a tour of the collection, she sets us to work in a weaving master class. Further north, in Roșietici, we stop at the băști — houses dug into the hillside under stone vaults, which locals like to compare to hobbit homes.

We reach Soroca for a late lunch on the Nistru River embankment, walk the walls of its fortress — a near-perfect stone circle raised in the 1540s — and drive up to the Candle of Gratitude for the view over the river bend. The evening belongs to Soroca’s Roma hill, famous for its palaces crowned with domes and rooftop horses. A Roma family welcomes us to dinner, where turkey sarmale are the dish of the feast, before we turn in at a hotel in the town centre.

Two churches & Țaul manor

We start in Cosăuți, a village of some fifty stone carvers, where Ion, who set up its first stone-carving cooperative, and his son hand us hammer and chisel to try on the local sandstone. Then come two churches seven kilometres apart: the convent church at Rudi, built in 1777, and the church of Pocrovca’s Russian Old Believers.

Lunch is in Naslavcea, Moldova’s northernmost village, at the country’s only trout farm, where Dumitru walks us round the pools before the trout reaches the table. In the afternoon we drive to Țaul to stay with Iulia and Ion, who turned their apiary into a guesthouse after they retired. They open the hives for honey straight from the comb, and next door is Țaul park, planted between 1900 and 1904 for the banker Andrei Pommer, with his crumbling manor at its heart. Dinner ends with babă neagră, the dark, slow-baked cake no festive table in the north goes without.

Crafts and hiking in the North

In Hlinaia, Marcel — who fell for masks as a boy, watching a neighbour make them for Malanca, the New Year masquerade, and has made more than a thousand since — shows us how flour paste and paper become a face, and we paint a mask of our own to take home. Then we set off on foot through the Trinca gorge, where Neanderthals camped in the caves more than 80,000 years ago, and follow the Draghiște river to Fetești, the limestone amphitheatre locals call Moldova’s Little Switzerland, for lunch at a family guesthouse.

In Cupcini, a famous potter has spent more than twenty years turning clay into jugs and flasks, and we take a turn at his wheel. We spend the night in A-frame villas on the bank above the Prut River at Costești, where the reservoir turns gold at sunset.

Lake hikes & apple brandy

After breakfast we walk from the villas to the Duruitoarea gorge, where a cave above the reservoir sheltered people 100,000 to 160,000 years ago — one of the oldest Palaeolithic sites in Moldova. A few kilometres on, the Văratic gorge cuts through an ancient coral reef, with caves and three small waterfalls.

We stop for a home-cooked lunch in Văratic village, where we try the iconic village-style dishes of Moldova’s North. Then we drive to Bălți for Barza Albă, distilling since 1944, where a sommelier pours divins aged for decades and a calvados-style brandy made from apple cider and aged for fifteen years. Then it’s the road back to Chișinău, where we arrive by early evening.