As Ana Blaskovic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, the Croatian capital has been ranked as one of the top cities in Europe this summer for a good brunch. The City of Zagreb was crowned the second best city for eating brunch, or as we call it, marenda, a meal that falls somewhere between breakfast and lunch, with a score of 8.85 out of a maximum of 10.
Only Athens in Greece was ranked better than Zagreb with a total score of 8.88 (out of 10). This conclusion was reached following research conducted by the portal Uswitch.com, which combed the ratings of visitors to 235,000 restaurants in a number of European capitals.
Despite th city’s high ranking, the average price of a meal in the best restaurants is also the seventh highest in Europe. A visitor will thus pay 32.48 euros for their Croatian brunch in Zagreb, almost twice as much as they’d need to fork out (no pun intended) in the Greek capital, where it will cost around 16.6 euros.
For tourists looking for a good meal, Athens is the first choice thanks to the choice of 1136 restaurants where the average brunch is the fifth cheapest in Europe. Side by side with Athens is Bratislava, with a brunch being only 24 cents more expensive, or 16.42 euros on average.
Zagreb and a good Croatian brunch is followed by Malta’s Valletta with a minimally lower restaurant rating of 8.84. Not only does Malta’s capital city offer some of the best dining experiences in all of Europe, it also took the second best rating among European capitals in the vegetarian restaurant segment.
At the same time, the average brunch on that Mediterranean island is almost 10 euros more affordable than it is here Zagreb, and cheaper meals are also offered in Lisbon, Sofia, Prague and Bratislava.
In anticipation of another record-breaking summer tourist season in which visitors will be on the prowl for a good restaurant after seeing the capital city’s sights and attractions, it is worth recalling the last one. Last year, 13.8 million arrivals and 84.1 million overnight stays were registered in the Republic of Croatia.
Compared to the pandemic-dominated year of 2020, domestic tourism workers, as well as everyone who indirectly lives from tourism, were able to rub their hands together with satisfaction with 77 percent more arrivals and 55 percent more overnight stays. At the same time, the City of Zagreb has been successfully building its image of an extremely desirable destination in the continental part of the country for the last ten years, with 638 thousand arrivals registered officially.
According to the latest data from the City of Zagreb, in the first four months of this year, there were 221.6 thousand arrivals and 510.3 thousand tourist overnight stays. Compared to last year, Zagreb achieved 165 percent more arrivals and 132 percent more overnight stays, but tourism in the capital hasn’t yet fully recovered from the impact of the global coronavirus pandemic. By the end of April 2022, there were about 30 percent fewer arrivals and almost 17 percent fewer overnight stays realised in the city by tourists.
Over the last decade, as the attractiveness of the Croatian capital as a destination and its offer grew, with hostels, apartments, hotels and numerous restaurants being opened. The coronavirus pandemic stopped the upward trend in its very tracks, since the largest number of tourists to Zagreb mostly arrive by plane, and that mode of transportation was suspended for several months for tourism purposes.
With the summer now in full swing and with 2022’s figures looking extremely promising, even outdoing 2019’s in some areas, a Croatian brunch being given number two in all of Europe will certainly help place Zagreb on the gastronomy map.
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