Breakfast at Berix Restaurant in Lemay can be as ordinary as eggs and bacon, toast, and American coffee. But why be boring when you can be adventurous? Try Bosnian selections that bend and then break the fast with tasty alternatives. The tidy restaurant offers table service with menus, but a stroll to the counter reveals much more about the food and pastries than printed words and pretty pictures.
The pie case holds trays of savory pies. Some sit rope-like, wrapped in ovals as sleek as Princess Leia’s buns. Others wear top crusts that are smooth and toasty brown. Stuff chopped spinach and creamy cheese in a flaky phyllo, and you’ve got zeljanica. Burek—a meat pie fat with Bosnian-style ground beef and sirnica, lightly stuffed with a white soft-curd cheese—delivers on taste, flakiness, and a buttery richness bordering on sinful. The potato version, krompurisa, was sold out during numerous visits, but the combination sounds divine.
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The sleeper in the breakfast panoply is pura, a fine cornmeal mush, like a fluffy polenta, served with a topping of cheese and sour cream. Spoons slide in easy. It’s hard to stop. The serving fills a big platter, but you must stop: Dessert and sweetly thick Turkish coffee awaits the prudent breakfast patron.
There’s baklava, layered cream cake, jelly roll-like banana cake, chocolate, coconut squares, little toques of chocolate and whipped cream—heaven. It’s all on display at the counter, which is why you want to take that stroll first.
But don’t stop with breakfast. Lunch and dinner selections deliver, too. Try the Bosnian version of a gyro, the Doner-kebab sandwich. A big round of Bosnian flatbread—split and filled with grilled spiced lamb and beef, then topped with a wicked sour cream-yogurt-cucumber dressing and thin slices of sweet onion—is big enough to share.
You’ll find a veal steak served with a simple pan sauce, as well as pitch-perfect creamy potatoes, sarma, cevapi sausages, unusual stuffed peppers, punjena paprika, and more Though different, the food is accessible: Trips to Berix remind me of my grandmother’s hearty, flavorful cooking; she was born to immigrant German parents, but she lived with a Polish farm family after her mother died.
So try a visit. If a full meal seems daunting, order pastries and coffee, and get a feel for the place. Sit on the patio, and sip Turkish coffee. Have an adventure out of the ordinary.
2201 Lemay Ferry
314-845-3711
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner Sun–Thu.
Fri – Sat: 9 a.m. – 8 p.m.
