Throughout the island’s history, one common thread has been its reputation as a center of gastronomy. As long ago as the second century B.C., the Alexandrian scholar Athenaeus was extolling the region’s wine: “At Issa . . . wine is made which is superior to every other wine whatever.”
Winemaking using the local grape varieties — vugava for white, plavac for red — remains a thriving cottage industry today. But Vis also boasts the food to accompany it: This is often described as the culinary capital of the Adriatic.
In the evening, we go to one of its seafood standard-bearers. Jastozera, meaning “lobster,” is a beguilingly ramshackle joint where the diners sit on planks set over the sea. Nets and ropes hang from the ceiling, rowboats float in the illuminated water, and the rusted frame of a spinning wheel provides the base for our table. When our large-bellied Italian neighbors order thermidor, a waitress takes up a pole to hoist the restaurant’s eponymous specialty — big blue crustaceans with bolt-cutter pincers — out of the lobster cages that sit directly below us.
Our menu selection is less theatrical but no less appetizing. A waiter comes over with a platter of fish caught that day — dory, turbot, sea bass, bream — and your selection comes back from the kitchen simply presented but cooked to perfection.
This uncomplicated cooking style is rooted in past impoverishment: During the military occupation, as the island’s ancient trading links eroded, locals had no choice but to live off the limited bounty of the surrounding sea. With delectable irony, this unfussy culinary ethos is now considered the pinnacle of sophistication.
At the posher end of the spectrum, restaurants such as Villa Kaliopa, where tables are secluded amid the luxuriant foliage of a 16th-century walled garden, now coax in a transient yacht set who moor up each evening, hungry after a day on the water. (When we return from Komiza on the last bus, Vis Town has adopted the air of a miniature Cannes.) But even here the culinary ethos hints at the same unfussiness that you find at the humblest of homespun konobas, or taverns, with their tables scattered beside the street. You’re unlikely to find any nouvelle cuisine or molecular gastronomy on the menus here; on Vis, it’s about letting ingredients speak for themselves.
Perhaps it’s this wise indifference to glitz and puffery that persuades the kind of A-listers you’d more likely associate with the French Riviera to occasionally weigh anchor here. John Malkovich is reputed to be a regular visitor, and Tom Cruise dropped by in 2005. On our first trip that same year, we saw the tennis star Goran Ivanisevic — arguably Croatia’s most famous living native son — strolling along the promenade without a care in the world. “His mother lives on the other side of the island,” a passing waitress confided. “He comes here to be invisible.”
Text: washingtonpost.com
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