Vyprazany Syr Day

When I'm at school, which is most days of the week, I usually eat lunch in the school cafeteria, which is called the "canteen". I think I’m the only teacher in the department who regularly eats there, and when I tell my students about it they laugh at me, or are horrified. I'm more of an "eat to live" person, and I'll eat almost anything, so I don't mind.

The process you have to go through to get your meal at a Slovak school cafeteria, even if you’re a fluent speaker of Slovak, can only be described as herculian, or a major pain in the ass.

First, you must go to the frowning lady in the little window behind the snack bar. There, you give her 100 koruna (about three bucks), and she gives you one of these little metal things:



These are very important. Do you remember in college, perhaps at Mrs. E's cafeteria in Lawrence, KS, when you used to "borrow” (forever) the silverware? That just doesn’t happen here, thanks to the ingenious system that's been devised. When you enter the cafeteria, if you have your little metal thing, you hand it to a lady who controls the silverware. In return, she allows you to not have to eat with your hands. When you have finished, you drop your soiled silverware into a little bucket, and you get your little metal thing back. Bear in mind that this little metal thing is little, and I often lose it in my office, which can make eating a plate of goulash a real nightmare.

Anyway, if you've completed this you are ready for step 2: Choosing your meal. The Slovak cafeteria system is not a fan of waste. Unlike your high school cafeteria which would make a surplus of chicken nuggets which would then have to be thrown out or given to the local dogs, here the cafeterias have developed another shrewd system which saves money, and makes my life miserable.

The day before you wish to eat lunch, you have to go to the cafeteria and choose your meal for the following afternoon. If you want to eat lunch on Monday, you have to be at the school on Friday (which I almost never am).

You make your choice, stamp your ticket and put in into the locked box. Here's what the lunch-choosing station looks like:



One of the obvious tricks to choosing a good lunch is understanding what the menu says. At the beginning of the year, the department secretary was nice enough to translate some of the items for me, so that I could make an educated decision. I started feeling like this was a burden on her, so I stopped asking, and just started picking the first item of the day. Here's a sample menu:



So for instance, if I was going to eat this particular Monday, I would be served the husarska rolada. What is that? I honestly don't know. For some reason, many food words don’t appear in my budget Slovak-English dictionary, and there are menu items that even the students or teachers can’t translate, or have never heard of. Basically, this makes every meal a crap-shoot, in more ways that one.

When you arrive in the cafeteria, you get in the line that corresponds with the menu item that you chose for the day. There are few more disquieting feelings than when you have chosen the first menu item, let's say "A", and find yourself to be the only person in the "A" line. It makes it worse when the students in the other lines look at you with a combination of sympathy and disgust. This actually happened when I ordered the "shark's head". Which I didn't finish.

Anywho, this all relates to one of the most controversial lunch items in the cafeteria's arsenal, the "vyprazany syr", which translates as fried cheese. Vyprazany syr is a very popular dish in Slovakia, and usually consists of a piece of heavily fried edam cheese, slathered in tartar sauce, with a side of french fries. If you are a vegetarian in Slovakia who is attempting to stay alive, you are probably very familiar with the V.S. I myself enjoy it from time to time, but try not to make a habit of it.

The crazy thing about vyprazany syr is that even though most students I have spoken to claim to hate it, when it is on the menu (“Vyprazany Syr Day”, about once every three weeks), almost every single person in the cafeteria is eating it. Young and old, stout and thin, no one can resist. I get it, too, but mainly because I actually know what it is, as opposed to many of the other menu items. Witness the line for the vyprazany syr:



On the day that I snuck my camera into the cafeteria, vprazany syr day, the line was out the door. Incredible! One of the lecturers from the German department told me a great story about going into the cafeteria on V.S. Day wearing a new sweater from her grandmother, which then smelled like grease for weeks, due to the heavy grease atmosphere that cooking hundreds of portions of fried cheese in a small space tends to cause. So what does it look like?





On this day, the V.S. was served with some boiled potatoes, and the usual tartar sauce. You may have noticed the soup on my plate, which deserves a quick digression. Slovaks love soup and eat soup before every meal. There are a few soups that the cafeteria rotates through, such as cabbage, carrot, something red (beets?) and a pasta soup. I never was a big fan of soup before I came here, and now I can honestly say that I hate soup. Not because Slovak soup is bad, but because I am so tired of seeing it every day. If you go to a restaurant, you are supposed to order soup. If you don't, the server will sometimes just stand there until you do, probably because they cannot imagine eating a meal without soup. But to soup I say, no thank you. You also can take all the bread you want (I think, although I never tried to just grab an armful, so who knows).

In the Slovak cafeteria, there are no napkins. Paper is expensive, and people here don't seem to spill their food (or soup) anyway. Personally, I usually leave the cafeteria in need of being hosed down, which is another reason why I now avoid the soup. Diners also don't generally drink anything with their meal, even when the cafeteria sometimes offers a free small cup of kool-aid-like drink from a cooler. I don't know why.

When you have finished your food, you take your tray to this little window and drop off your plate. It is all very orderly, and it reminds me of elementary school:



The cafeteria is great because it's a bargain, a student meal ticket is only 23SKK, which is about 75 cents. How I got the student tickets is a great story of intrigue, deception and hard alcohol, but I should probably save it for another day, because my fingers are beat. I would link you to a vyprazany syr recipe, but I assume you just take some cheese and fry it. Give it a try.

Tomorrow I am headed to the Ukraine, and next week to Western Europe. I'll try to get some pictures of the Louvre, just to prove that all that stuff in the Da Vinci Code is totally true. Dovidenia!