Plovdiv, Bulgaria

A Plovdiv mehana set inside a 16th-century Mevlevi dervish hall, the only surviving wing of a Sufi monastery built by Arif Dede when the order relocated from Budapest. The basement walls sit directly on a 2nd-century Roman fortress; the dining rooms above keep the original beams and stone arches. The restaurant opened on the site in 1974, was rebuilt by new owners in 2001, and has been one of the Old Town's anchor tables ever since. The name is the medieval Slavic name for Plovdiv. The kitchen runs traditional Trakian and Rhodopean dishes: a long meze list of cured meats — lukanka sliced thin from local producers, sirene, kashkaval, lutenitsa — followed by stuffed peppers, kavarma stews, lamb shoulder, and warm banitsa from a wood-fired oven.