Restaurant Ahora Sofia

Chef Sevda Dimitrova won the Bulgarian Masterchef competition in 2016. But she has not been all her life into cooking. She lived some years in Spain and concentrated her creative senses on photography.

I have not seen her photos but I would image everyone of them being composed with an extraordinary senses of aesthetics, stunning beauty and always telling a story. Why would I do this? Go there and look at her dishes. You will find rarely dishes plated which such beauty and harmonious composition of colours and textures. Something like this you cannot learn, you need to have a natural sense for it, she must simply feel it.

Look at the Water Lily Lake dish, the description tells you the story and eating it lets you taste and fell it. Stunning. The Sense of Summer, a composition of Cod and compressed cucumbers could have been inspired by the abstract Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. It has a bed of cod, topped with layer of geometrically arranged cucumbers and an ajo blanco ice cream. The Celeriac Mille Feuille would make the wizard and world champion of Celeriac, Daniel Berlin, proud.

The flavours are restrained without getting boring and the execution mostly perfect. Sometimes, as with other places in Bulgaria, one wished that Chef Dimitrova would have a better and more consistent supply chain. With great ingredients, these ambitious and very talented Chefs like Ms. Dimitrova would become destinations where the foodies of this world would converge to. Less