Day 6 eats - Breakfast at Sartoria dei Sapori and Dinner at Chef’Art

Breakfast at Sartoria dei Sapori

As we didn’t have breakfast at the hotel (and frankly looking at the dank restaurant on heading out in the morning, quite glad we didn’t), we headed out to find some breakfast.

Tirana doesn’t seem to be a great place to get a proper meal at breakfast. Initially we headed out to a place we had seen making crźpes the night before, thinking it would be open for breakfast options, only to find it closed. We wandered around The Block for a good half hour looking for a place to no avail.

Tirana seems like the place where breakfast is a cigarette and coffee, and maybe a pastry if you are feeling peckish. But outside of the hotel breakfast options, there didn’t seem to be much.

We finally did stumble upon Sartoria dei Sapori, and the waiter did promise us as we looked at the menu (for lunch and dinner options) that, “Yes, we do have breakfast.”



We sat down inside, and had a some water, with Dennis having a coffee. For breakfast, we both went for the Rossini – scrambled eggs with Parmigiano Reggiano and avocado cream. It made the eggs a slightly weird greenish colour (Sam, I am, will I eat green eggs…), but was a lovely breakfast and one of the few places we found in the Block serving a proper breakfast and not just pastries.





Total was 1900 Lek. If you don’t have hotel breakfast and are looking for a nice place, Sartoria Dei Sapori is decent.

Dinner at Chef’Art

For dinner, we found online another well reviewed local cuisine restaurant called Chef’Art.

The restaurant decor was – not dissimilar to The Smoke House Bar and Grill the day before – a mix of rustic and modern. Perhaps this is a style in Albania?





I got a glass of the house red (or 3). They didn’t have a bottle of it, as apparently the house wines are delivered en masse, but the waiter did show me this bottle of a wine from the same vineyard called Kallmeti. The house red was decent drinking.



We went for a village salad, bruschetta, Cheese-stuff meatballs and a mixed meat grill.




Total came to 6250 Lek.

Dining Overall Thoughts

With many restaurants we saw in Tirana and Durres, there is a strong Italian and Greek influence. That may be natural as they are all countries bordering the Adriatic, or it may be that Albania rediscovers their local cuisine after it apparently being repressed by the communists (as suggested by Rick Stein in this travelogue when it is next available on the iPlayer), I don’t know. But overall it was a good mix of decent meats and seafoods, with lots of fresh salads.