Balkan Treat Box was a hit almost from the moment that Loryn and Edo Nalic rolled out their food truck in early 2017. So when the husband-and-wife team announced they would open a brick-and-mortar location in Webster Groves, the restaurant immediately became one of the most eagerly anticipated openings of this year.
Finally, the wait is over: The restaurant opens its doors this Wednesday, February 13.
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The centerpiece of the new space is a long community table created by David Stine Furniture. The walls are adorned with striking art, including a copper map of the Balkans.
Artist/designer Tim Kent created a colorful mosaic-style piece, composed of blocks of wood protruding at varying lengths (which doubles as a sound dampener).
The concept has come a long way from the early days of the food truck. “We would have ten or 15 customers a day,” Edo said. “We had this picture menu, and the pictures were really bad. It didn’t look appetizing. People would peek at it, and just keep walking. But a few brave people would try the food, and they would tell their friends what to have, and people would come back.”
Edo was born in Zvornik, Bosnia, on the Bosnian-Serbian border. As a boy, Edo said “I passionately ate everything, but I didn’t do much cooking.” He spends more time in the kitchen today, but the chef’s hat belongs to Loryn. “I really do the cooking,” she said. “He’s my face.”
Loryn, who grew up in south city before moving to Los Angeles with her father as a teenager, had her first encounters with Balkan food long before she met Edo. “I had a Croatian friend, and his mother taught me how to sew” she said. “I would go to their parties, and we would have cevapi. She would always make me palačinki (crepes). She taught me how to make them on the back of a pan. I was blown away.”
The menu features the greatest hits of the Balkan Treat Box food truck, along with four new dishes. Most dishes involve somun bread (similar, but more multi-dimensional than pita) and a choice of protein, with a vegetarian option usually available in addition to various meats.
New additions to the menu include Lahmacun, a Turkish-style flatbread served with spicy minced beef or tofu. It can be served flat or rolled with parsley, lemon, and onion.
There’s Pljeskavica, or the “Balkan burger,” and Balik Ekmek, a grilled fish sandwich. Patlidzan is a vegetarian sandwich featuring wood-fired eggplant.
For many St. Louisans, the classics need no introduction. The pide is a boat-shaped Turkish flatbread topped with a choice of beef, chicken, eggplant, or cheese, along with kajmak (a creamy white cheese popular in the Balkans), ajvar (a spicy red pepper spread), herbs, and cabbage.
Döner features thin-sliced beef, chicken, or tofu on somun, with onion, cabbage, cheese, tomato, lettuce and “BTB” sauce.
All of this is street food,” said Edo. “More often than not, it’s something you grab out of a window or a tiny restaurant. For certain cravings, you go to certain places.”
“Back home, eating out is a treat, hence the ‘treat’ in our name,” said Edo. “When you’re hungry, you go home and eat. You don’t just spend money. But when you have it, you treat yourself.”
Sourcing the right meat for their cevapi was a long, slow process. After considering a number of butchers and suppliers, Loryn enlisted the help of Kern Meat Company. They’re amazing people, and they were down with the task,” she said. “I worked side by side with them to develop the flavor we needed. How much of each muscle and where it’s coming from. The fat, when the grind happens, when the seasoning happens. It seems like we tested that a ton of times, but now they know exactly what we need. We have a blend that’s proprietary now.”
The food truck’s key piece of equipment was its wood-fired oven, but with a brick-and-mortar space, the Nalics have been able to build out their toolkit. The kitchen features a much larger copper-colored oven, three spit-roasters for the döner, and a wood-assist grill (the secret to cooking proper cevapi).
Baking bread in the wood-fired oven is also crucial to the cevapi experience, as Loryn discovered for herself. “Every cevapi place I went to in Sarajevo you get the wood-fired bread, the sausages grilled over wood, and the kajmak and onion, and that’s it,” she said. “I added the acid with the cabbage, because I would get a side of kupus (cabbage) salad, which broke up the fat and the decadent richness of the cevapi.”
“These are our staples,” Loryn said, “but once we’re open for a while we can start to pull dishes from the Croatian coast, seafood, and then you go down into Greece, and you’ll be seeing things from us from all over that region.”
Prior to opening the food truck, Loryn went on a two-month trip around the Balkans, from Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, to Istanbul in Turkey. “I didn’t really have an understanding of it until I went there. Edo kept telling me ‘you’re not going to know until you go.’ It was so exciting,” she said.
Loryn’s goal was to return to St. Louis armed with recipes and the culinary skills of a Balkan grandmother. And she went straight to the source, with Edo’s brother for translation support. “I would find people in markets and say ‘What are you going to make?’ Loryn said. “And it would end up being like ‘I’ll buy your groceries, let’s go make this together.’ They didn’t even blink an eye. It was just like ‘Yes, come. Tomorrow. Or let’s go. Right now.’ I would be in these women’s homes, maybe two generations of women, and we would cook together. That’s how I learned homestyle food.”
The plan is for the food truck to return to the streets of St. Louis when warmer weather returns. However, for now, Loryn and Edo are busy enough getting their first brick and mortar restaurant up and running.
“If we have to put the truck off for a little while, we will,” Loryn said. “Right now, we’re doing limited service, because first of all we need to train our staff. We just got this kitchen three weeks ago. Then we can ramp it up and start doing longer hours, but that’s the only way to control it, by pumping the brakes a little, making sure everything is made right and served right.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Edo said. “There won’t be any bread baked today then put in the freezer and sold tomorrow. Fresh bread every day.”
Balkan Treat Box will initially be open Wednesday through Sunday, and, for now, opening hours will be dictated by supply and demand: The restaurant will stay open until it sells out.
Editor’s note: This article has been expanded from the original version.
