Private enterprise has vastly increased the number of places to drink , and all town centres now have a healthy sprinkling of kiosks serving coffee, soft drinks and basic snack food, usually with plastic chairs and tables on the adjoining pavement. Some of them serve beer, vodka, and other strong drinks, and stay open well after nightfall, but for the most part they're a daytime, fairweather phenomenon. A more traditional venue is the sladkarnitsa a Bulgarian version of the Central European café, many of which serve cakes as well as alcohol.

Evening drinking tends to take place in restaurants (where it's quite common for tables to be monopolized by drinkers rather than diners), or in the vast number of bars operating under the generic title of kafe-aperitiv . Some are no more than a converted garage or basement room, though many of them - in Sofia, Plovdiv and along the coast in particular - compare favourably with anything found in the average Western European town. Here you can get the full range of domestic alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, as well as imported spirits and canned beers, and all kinds of cocktails in the flashier places.

Coffee can be excellent or vile, so it pays to look before ordering. If they've got a machine behind the counter, you can order a kafe espresso or a kapuchino with reasonable confidence and maybe feel emboldened to ask if they also do turska (Turkish coffee) or Viensko kafe (Viennese coffee), which comes with a dollop of ice cream on top. If not, you risk getting a revolting brew from some kind of instant coffee under the generic title of neskafe , or nes . Coffee is often drunk in tandem with a glass of juice ( sok ), usually a pretty artificial cocktail of citrus fruits - naturalen sok (natural fruit juice from a bottle or packet) or fresh (freshly squeezed juice) usually costs more. Delicious domestically produced fruit juices ( nektar , or fruktovi sok ) are sometimes sold bottled in supermarkets and food shops, but rarely appear in cafés or bars. Tea ( chay ) is available in most cafés; specify cheren chay or black tea unless you want some herbal concoction.

Other bezalkoholni (non-alcoholic) choices include gazirana voda (gaseous mineral water), or international beverages such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, Fanta and Sprite.