Balkan Oven Burek Bakery Café

There’s always a queue for takeaway, but it’s much more fun to eat in, joining the hordes of locals sitting at the shaded café tables on this cosy pedestrian strip. Burek is the specialty here: flaky baked pies made with multiple layers of paper-thin pastry. The burek are baked all day, tipped out piping hot from their tins and sold as family sized whole pies ($18) or cut into quarters ($5). The pastry layers progress from crisp and golden shards to soft waves before hitting a filling of either beef mince, cheese, or cheese and spinach. The cheese is a house-made mixture of Bulgarian and Australian fetta combined with ricotta.

You can jump-start your system with an espresso cup of Macedonian coffee, boiled in a long-handled copper pot directly over flame, but the traditional drink to have with burek is buttermilk, served cold by the glass.
Kifli so sirenje are soft yeast crescent rolls filled with a crumble of brined cheese that makes a perfect takeaway snack. For dessert, move onto strudli so jabolko, or apple strudel: squat pastry rolls of cinnamon-spiced apples and sultanas, dusted with icing sugar and served with cream.