All the Tastes of Croatia in Arena Zagreb

Make room in your agenda for a visit to the 2nd Food and Wine Festival which will take place between April 3rd and 5th in Arena Zagreb. A true adventure awaits you on a gastronomic journey through Croatia whose country partner at this year's festival will be Italy.

Are you curious about the flavours of Croatian regional foods? Do you want to sample some of them and enjoy the delicious tastes of various regional specialties? If so, the 2nd Croatian Food and Wine Festival is the place to visit. It will take place in Arena Zagreb from April 3rd to 5th, and like last year, you can look forward to a real adventure on this gastronomic journey through Croatia.

The festival covers the four most important segments of the eno-gastronomic offer: the presentation of wine growing and gastronomic areas through cooking shows, wine workshops, sweet treats workshops and the HORECA programme, the last is envisaged as a place where restaurateurs and hoteliers will meet with food and wine manufacturers. During the festival, producers from several countries will present their products, while the organizers have announced the arrival of some famous international chefs, such as Renato Rizzardi from the restaurant Locanda di Piero in Vicenza, since Italy is the country partner of the 2nd Croatian Food and Wine Festival.

If one is to judge by last year's exceptional turnout, it is to be expected that again this year the festival will attract a host of visitors who will attend presentations by numerous clusters and associations, including the prosciutto cluster, the pasta group, the association of Slavonian kulin, the Graševina Croatica Association and many regional winemakers' associations. Visitors can look forward to tasting a range of delicacies, cheeses, honeys, liqueurs and brandies, jams, seafood, dry cured meat products, organic and other types of produce geared toward vegetarians and macrobiotics, products bearing the Halal certificate and many others. Visitors will be invited to taste all of these products, buy them and even get to the bottom of some culinary secrets from famous Croatian and international chefs who will stage cooking shows on two large podiums. We have no doubt that visitors with a sweet tooth will also find what they are looking for at this festival as they will have the opportunity to learn about authentic desserts made throughout Croatia, from the north to the south. These will include rožata (crème brûlée), the makarana cake of the Makarska region, the Rab cake, gingerbread cookies, Zagorje štrukli (oven baked dough filled with cottage cheese), the cake of Imotski, and so on. They will also be able to taste bakery products, raw food delicacies, chocolates with new flavours, and learn about how to prepare all these delicacies from reputable pastry chefs during the baking workshops.

Parents will be able to leave their young children in playrooms free of charge where professional staff will entertain and show them how to make real dough and cookies and thus teach them about table culture from a very young age.
The partners of the 2nd Croatian Food and Wine Festival are the City of Zagreb, the Zagreb Tourist Board and the Croatian Chamber of Economy, and the festival will take place under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of the Economy and the Croatian Chamber of Trades and Crafts.

To find more information about the event, go to www.festivalhraneivina.hr.