The mark of a city was once having a cathedral; now it must surely be a restaurant run by a former Noma chef.
So it is in Tirana, capital of Albania, where chef Bledar Kola brings a little Copenhagen flair to traditional Albanian dishes across an almost embarrassingly affordable tasting menu.
From the outside, you’d be forgiven for low expectations. Mullixhiu may be set on the edge of Tirana’s largest park, but it’s also situated directly below a Burger King, its entrance flanked by two rival Turkish ice cream sellers threateningly swirling their cones on sticks as you cross the threshold, ready to trap you in a viral video. Inside, though, the setting is charmingly rustic: dark wooden walls and flower-laden lampshades deck the low-ceilinged dining room, which is just dim enough to set the mood without leaving you squinting at the food.
There is an à la carte option, but the play here is the seasonal tasting menu: at €30 for seven courses, this is phenomenal value by Albanian standards, let alone English; even the overwhelmingly local wine list caps out around that same price.
On that note, throw out any assumptions about the country’s wine while you’re here — I can’t say every local vino impressed, but the two we drank at Mullixhiu far surpassed any expectations set by the country or the price tag. A red and a white, both produced from local Kallmet grapes, proved more than a match for the Italian wines we found elsewhere in Tirana, and astonishingly good value.
The menu itself opens strong: our seasonal salad of courgette, plums, and courgette flower is an inviting heap of razor-thin slices in a warm puddle of impossibly fragrant olive oil, delicate in texture but intensely flavourful. I would drink this oil through a straw if they’d let me.
Some dishes defy easy explanation. Mullixhiu’s take on qifqi, a type of local rice ball, comes deep-fried in a coating of egg, like an arancino bundled inside a Thai omelette, sharp sour cream beneath to cut neatly through the oily egg.
Two small veal meatballs in a pale, dill-flecked broth are not quite so photogenic, but impossible to fault on first bite, while Kola and his team make tender work of a whole braised quail on a bed of polenta.
The star of the savoury courses comes halfway through the night, a temptingly wobbly piece of beef cheek balanced precariously on what the mis-translated menu call “layers of charcoal cooked party.” In fact it seems to be a slab made up of layers of pancake, a dense and stodgy counter-balance to the jelly-soft cheek.
Served with a translucent sauce made from sour cream and an especially floral honey, the effect isn’t far off bacon with maple syrup and pancakes, and I now live in hope that beef cheek and honey makes it onto brunch menus across the city soon.
Oddly, this isn’t the only hint of breakfast across the menu. Trahana, a fermented grain, comes as a palate cleanser before the quail. Here it’s served as a sort of nutty porridge, spotted by fermented blueberries for a sweet-sour touch, rimmed by a pea-green herbal sauce to stop it feeling too much like something you’d eat unthinkingly at your desk on a Thursday morning.
Grains are clearly a bit of a focus: the name ‘Mullixhiu’ is Albanian for ‘miller’, and the team here mill grain themselves. That small mill sits in an open-plan prep room, positioned promisingly next to a pasta machine that I suspect gets put to good use.
Perhaps unusually for a tasting menu, dessert is far more than an afterthought. ‘Qumeshtor’ is translated as ‘milk pie’, but in reality is closer to a firm flan or custard, lightly browned from baking, accompanied by ice cream and yet more honey and blueberries. This could be the best plate of the night, creamy and sweet and tart all at once, light in nature but generous enough to quash any lingering appetite.
Arguably the most impressive thing about Mullixhiu is that it can do all that, and still only charge €30 a head. Don’t write that off as budget Albania: this certainly isn’t the cheapest restaurant in town, but it’s a far cry from the most expensive too. There are tourist traps charging more for a meal than Mullixhiu, and I assure you they don’t compete on quality. In London they could charge double this and it would still be a steal, and round here the wine list would start right where Mullixhiu’s ends.
Just as importantly, in a country where it’s easier to eat Italian than anything else, Albanian food doesn’t often seem to be celebrated. I’m not sure how closely Mullixhiu’s Noma-inflected take resembles the traditional, but its roots are plain to see through the fancy flourishes and perfect plating, and it’s all the more appealing for it.