Although restaurants ( restorant ) vary widely in terms of decor and service, it's rare to find any cuisine but Bulgarian, outside of Sofia, and the range of dishes can be pretty limited - in some cases the waiter will merely rattle through a list of what's on that evening. Higher prices in top-notch restaurants don't necessarily imply a wider choice - merely a better quality of meat. Restaurants are usually open between about 11am and 11pm, although many close for a few hours in the afternoon. It's very difficult to get food after 11pm outside big city hotels or package resorts, and in provincial towns you'll be lucky to find anywhere open after 10pm.

The growth in new private places has largely put paid to the former dominance of hotel restaurants, which used to be a focus for the social life of the local elite in provincial towns, but are now mostly sad and soulless affairs. New restaurants catering to the nouveaux riches usually offer slightly more exotic menus than you'll find at the Communist-era restaurants in National Revival-period mansions in Plovdiv or Sozopol, where the food and service often fail to match the setting. As a rule though, you'd do better in a mehana or taverna, which concentrates on grills, salads and other traditional staples, and usually has tables outdoors and music in the evening. A han or hanche - literally an "inn" - is likewise usually decorated in the folk-style and features traditional cooking, while skara-bira are a lower form of culinary life serving little more than beer and kebabs and, in rural areas at least, traditionally a male-only preserve. In towns, you'll also find self-service restaurants ( ekspres-restorant ), which are invariably cheap, but often with reason.

With the exception of deluxe hotel restaurants in the capital, none of these places will cost the earth, and providing you avoid imported drinks, the bill should be very modest indeed: in most cases, a three-course meal for two, with a bottle of wine, will rarely exceed US$15, except in Sofia, Plovdiv and the coastal resorts, where you can expect to pay US$20-30 for the same.