Croatia’s Coastal Table
From Dubrovnik’s kitchens to Pelješac vineyards, following food and wine close to the source.
Food deliveries start early in Dubrovnik. If you’re near the Old Town in the morning, you’ll see small trucks pulling up with fish from Cavtat and crates of figs, citrus, and greens from the Konavle Valley. Much of it goes straight into kitchens before the streets get busy. Wine rests in cool limestone cellars, where the air remains still, and the temperature barely changes.
Just west of the Old Town, Hotel Bellevue Dubrovnik is built into the cliff above Miramare Bay. From the dining room, the Adriatic is close enough that you can watch the colour of its water shift as the light changes. The hotel feels slightly removed from the city’s bustle, and the kitchen works with the same local suppliers as many restaurants in the centre.
Executive chef Mate Matić cooks whatever comes in. If fishermen bring tuna, he cooks tuna. If scampi are available, he uses scampi. Figs sometimes arrive firm, still a day from ripeness. Olive oil varies from producer to producer. For his veal, he reduces prošek until it turns glossy and loses its alcoholic edge. The dishes change as often as the ingredients do.
That same cadence appears across the city once autumn arrives. Every October, Dubrovnik celebrates the Good Food Festival just as the heat and crowds fade, and locals start returning to restaurants they usually skip in summer. For a couple of weeks, eateries around the city display set menus built around whatever is coming in at that time of year: local white fish, Konavle olive oil, malvasija wine, and the usual autumn produce. There are cooking workshops, tastings, and small events scattered through the old streets. It all wraps up with Dubrovnik Table, when hotels, bakeries, wineries, and neighbourhood kitchens line Stradun with long counters and hand out food straight from the street.
At the same time, Adriatic Luxury Hotels stages its Taste the Mediterranean dinners. Visiting chefs rotate through Hotel Bellevue Dubrovnik and its sister property, Hotel Excelsior Dubrovnik, working with whatever ingredients are available that day. Some menus tilt Italian; others, French. Whole fish arrive untrimmed. Herbs are cut late in the afternoon. Dishes are finalized close to service.
In 2025, at the Excelsior, London-based chef Carmelo Carnevale joined Mate Matić for Dubrovnik Welcomes Sicily, a six-course dinner built around shared Mediterranean ingredients. The following evening, Paris-based chef Beatriz Gonzalez cooked alongside Petar Obad of Sensus, drawing on the same local supply.
Just a short boat ride away from Dubrovnik’s tasting menus and visiting chefs, the Elaphiti Islands sit just offshore, where meals follow long-established tradition. Only three of the islands are permanently inhabited. Pine forests cover most of the land, broken up by old stone houses and the remains of summer estates built by Dubrovnik’s merchant families. Lunch is usually simple: a grilled fish, a loaf of bread torn at the table, a bottle of white wine pulled from cold water. Many meals are eaten within sight of the sea where the fish was caught.
North of Dubrovnik, near Ston and Mali Ston, salt pans stretch across shallow fields laid out centuries ago. Their low stone dividers still guide the evaporation process. Salt from this area once supported the Dubrovnik Republic, whose defensive wall still runs above the channel. In the same waterway, oyster farms sit in brackish water fed by freshwater springs. Shellfish grow suspended from ropes and are pulled up by hand. Oysters are opened on floating platforms and eaten on the spot, usually with bread and a glass of local wine.
Inland, the Konavle Valley runs between the mountains and the coast, dotted with citrus trees, olive groves, and small family plots. Much of the region’s produce comes from here. At Kameni Dvori, an agrotourism property in the village of Gruda, meals unfold slowly. Dough is mixed by hand. Herbs are cut from the garden. Veal cooks under a metal peka lid, while bay leaves burn beneath it. Wine comes from unlabelled bottles kept cool in the cellar.
Back on the coast, Cavtat functions on a smaller scale. Fishing boats tie up beside cafés along the promenade, and locals swim from the sea wall in the late afternoon, climbing the same stone ladders year after year. Hotel Supetar Cavtat occupies a restored 1920s villa with 16 rooms and a shaded courtyard. In the kitchen, Dubrovnik-born chef Renato Gverić works with nearby farms and Dubrovnik markets: octopus with wild greens gathered inland, veal with seasonal vegetables, olive-oil cake finished simply with citrus zest. During the Good Food Festival, the menu shifts to a tasting format, drawing locals as readily as visitors.
Wine appears everywhere along the coast. An hour north, the Pelješac Peninsula rises steeply from the sea. Vineyards cling to narrow terraces exposed to wind and sun. Many slopes are too steep for machinery, so harvesting is done by hand. At Miloš Winery in Ponikve, Ivan Miloš produces organic plavac mali using native yeast and ages it unfiltered in large Slavonian oak barrels. “Under socialism, state cooperatives paid growers by volume,” he says. “Once families owned their vineyards again, quality improved.”
Plavac mali, a thick‑skinned grape related to zinfandel and primitivo, handles heat and drought well, producing small, concentrated harvests. Croatian wines earned 14 gold medals at the 2025 Decanter World Wine Awards, with plavac mali among the standouts. Production remains small. More than 100 indigenous grape varieties are grown by a population of just over three million. Many bottles stay close to where they’re made.
Pelješac’s wine tradition reaches well beyond the peninsula itself. Miljenko “Mike” Grgić, born in Dalmatia, helped shape Napa Valley’s reputation in 1976 when the chardonnay he made for Chateau Montelena beat French labels in Paris. After the war, he returned to establish Grgić Vina in Trstenik, producing plavac mali and pošip with the same approach. Later research confirmed the genetic link between plavac mali and zinfandel.
Malvasija dubrovacka nearly disappeared in the 1990s, when vineyards were damaged during the war. A handful of surviving vines allowed researchers to repopulate it. Today, it appears widely along the coast—dry, aromatic, and often listed simply as house white, poured alongside whatever is coming out of the kitchen that day.
Photographs courtesy of Mark Sissons and Adriatic Luxury Hotels
