Five Days of Enjoying in the Best Meat Dishes at the Meat Me Festival

This tourist-gastronomic event in one of the most beautiful Dalmatian cities was organized for the first time in 2019 as an unpretentious boutique festival whose goal was to present the gastronomic tradition of Zadar, its region and Dalmatia. It has become an extremely popular multi-day festival where meat dishes are enjoyed by local people and many tourists, especially neighbors from Slovenia and Italy, who arrive in this city after the main tourist season and the hot summer.

Meat Me is organized where each of the five days is dedicated to one gastronomy topic, a type of meat from which traditional, but also more modern dishes inspired by heritage cuisine, are made respectively. These dishes are prepared by well-known, already established chefs and restaurants from Zadar, and this year two eminent restaurants from Zagreb and Pula are participating at the Zadar festival.

This year lamb dishes have deservingly found their position on the  menu on the first day of the festival, at the very opening itself. The famous Zadar chef and cookery professor Josip Vrsaljko will prepare two dishes: traditional lamb ragu with broad beans, peas and potatoes, one of the most typical Dalmatian dishes "with a spoon", and one of his original works – sous vide lamb loin with famous sheep cheese from the island of Pag.

Lamb is the most popular meat in Dalmatia, particularly in the Zadar area. After all, Dalmatia acquired its name from the Illyrian word for sheep - delma. The superior quality and specific aroma and taste of this meat is related to the varied grazing on the pastures of this part of the Mediterranean. Just this year, Dalmatian lamb deservedly received the European designation of origin and geographical origin.

Due to the Dalmatian lamb and the Meat Me Festival, the famous Italian gastro TV star Fabrizio Nonis will come to Zadar, and he will dedicate one of the episodes of the Beker on Tour show to Zadar and this event. 

At the Meat Me Festival, dishes from poultry, meat offal, game and the famous Istrian boškarin beef will also be cooked. Due to boškarin, the cooking team from the famous Pula restaurant Vodnjanka of the Civitico family will be coming to the festival. In its 40 years of existence, Vodnjanka has become a cult place of Istrian hospitality primarily due to its always fresh ingredients and simple dishes drawn from its culinary heritage. In Zadar, boškarin will be slowly cooked and served with Istrian baby beef sweetbread.

 A team from one of Zagreb's most popular restaurants, Tač, is coming to Zadar for offal dishes. This well-known place of Zagreb and Croatian hospitality is easiest to describe as a living salon of Croatian national cuisine, because its offer covers all the diversity of this country's gastronomy. In Zadar, Tač will cook tripe and beef brisket dishes, which are loved by many.

On the second day of the festival, poultry dishes will be prepared by the well-known Zadar chef Renato Kraljev. 

Tomislav Karamarko, one of Zadar's most popular chefs of the middle generation, will prepare venison, boar and deer dishes under a tent on Friday, October 13, at the festival square in Zadar's Marketplace. Meat Me Festival has, in addition to the gastronomic program, a musical accompanying program: well-known DJs from Zadar will take turns at the counter all day, and Friday and Saturday evenings will be enriched with concerts by well-known Croatian bands Elemental and Silente.

Meat Me will be open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on all five festival days, and organized by the Tourist Board of the City of Zadar with the support of the Croatian Tourist Board and the of Zadar County Tourist Board.