Zagreb isn’t a city of big sights. It’s a city for sitting down, and a Zagreb food tour is one of the quickest ways to understand why. It has always felt a bit like home to me, and a lot of that comes down to the food on the table: štrukli straight from the oven, cheese sellers at Dolac and a cafe in almost every second shopfront, all of them full.
On one visit I liked it so much I pushed my Plitvice trip back a whole year rather than leave. These are the three food tours worth booking, followed by the dishes to track down with or without a guide.
In short: Book the Zagreb Food Tour: Local Dishes & City Stories, a small-group walk that eats its way from Dolac Market up to the Stone Gate.
Zagreb Food Tours
Top Pick
Zagreb Food Tour: Local Dishes & City Stories
Duration: 3.5 hours, starting at the horse statue on Ban Jelačić Square
Guest rating: 4.9/5 on GetYourGuide
Pastries, meat dishes, local cheeses and Croatian liqueurs at a string of local spots, with Dolac Market, Skalinska ulica, Tkalčićeva and the Stone Gate along the way. Groups top out at 12, and it covers both the Lower and Upper Town.
Guests love: tastings big enough to replace a meal, guides who seem to know everyone and the history between bites.
Watch out for: vegetarian and allergy needs have to be sent to the provider before the day.
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Market Tour
Crobites: Zagreb’s First Free Gastro Tour
Duration: 2 hours
Guest rating: 4.9/5 on GetYourGuide
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Half of this tour happens at Dolac, meeting the vendors and tasting your way through the stalls. From there it wanders through Opatovina Park to Tkalčićeva for a few more bites, five to seven in total. It suits anyone short on time or watching the budget.
Guests rave about the guides and like that nobody pushes you to buy anything. It runs on tips, though, and drinks aren’t included, so bring cash.
For Wine Lovers
Zagreb: Restaurants, Food & Old Town Walking Tour
Duration: 3.5 hours
Guest rating: 4.8/5 on GetYourGuide
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No snacking on the move here. You sit down at four restaurants for around 40 minutes each, with regional dishes and a glass of wine or local spirits at each stop. I don’t drink much wine, so it isn’t the one I’d book, but if you do, this is the one.
Guests say the restaurants are well chosen and that four stops add up to a full meal. It needs at least two bookings to run and doesn’t work for vegans.
Plan a trip to Croatia’s capital, Zagreb.
What to Eat in Zagreb
Zagreb cooks like the inland Habsburg city it was, which means the food has more in common with Vienna than with the seafood down on the coast. I mostly eat vegetarian but make room for local specialities when I travel. In Zagreb that usually ends with me skipping the funicular and walking up to the Upper Town to work some of it off.
Vegetarians do better here than the meat-heavy reputation suggests. Cheese turns up everywhere, from štrukli to the market dairy stalls, and most of the sweets are fair game.
Štrukli
If Zagreb has a signature dish, it’s štrukli: thin dough wrapped around fresh cheese, then boiled or baked until the top blisters. It comes from Zagorje, the hilly region just north of the city. La Štruk on Skalinska ulica makes nothing else, from the plain salty version to baked ones topped with walnuts and honey or truffles, and the Local Dishes & City Stories tour walks right down that street.
Sir i Vrhnje
Fresh cow’s cheese with sour cream. That’s the whole dish, and it’s the one locals actually buy at Dolac, from the dairy sellers in the covered market below the red umbrellas. The Crobites market tour includes a taste, which is handy if you’d rather not point and guess.
Burek and Čvarci
Burek is the flaky pastry Zagreb eats for breakfast, usually filled with cheese or minced meat and sold from bakeries all over town. Čvarci are crisp pork cracklings, a snack you’ll see piled up at the market. Both turn up on the Crobites tasting list.
Visit Plitvice Lakes National Park on a day trip from Zagreb.
Zagrebački Odrezak
Zagreb was once nicknamed Little Vienna, and its answer to the Wiener schnitzel is a veal cutlet folded around ham and cheese, then breaded and fried. It’s always breaded, which is what separates it from a cordon bleu. Traditional places like Vinodol, Pri Zvoncu and Purger still keep it on the menu. The old-school side dish is risi e bisi, rice with peas, another hand-me-down from the Habsburg kitchen.
Purica s Mlincima
Roast turkey from Zagorje served with mlinci, thin baked flatbreads broken into pieces and soaked in the roasting juices. It’s Sunday lunch and Christmas food, and Vinodol in the Lower Town is a reliable place to order it. For a sit-down introduction to inland cooking with wine to match, the restaurant and wine tour covers a lot of ground over four stops.
Ajngemahtec
The name gives away its Austrian roots. Ajngemahtec is a thick stew of chicken, vegetables and little dough dumplings, and about as hearty as old Zagreb home cooking gets. It’s harder to find on menus than štrukli, so order it when you see it.
Samoborska Kremšnita
A tall slab of pale custard between layers of puff pastry, with a thin layer of whipped cream under the top crust. It belongs to Samobor, a short trip west of Zagreb, where a local confectioner created the recipe in the 1920s. It’s now on Croatia’s national list of intangible heritage, which is a lot of paperwork for a cake.
Fritule
Small fried doughnuts dusted with sugar, eaten by the paper bag. You’ll find them around Croatia, but they come into their own in Advent. The ones at the Zagreb Christmas market are amazing, and reason enough to visit in December.
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Recommendations are made independently, based on extensive research and personal experience.