A national obsession with the funny-sounding name tsatsa цаца, this crispy seafood snack is the perfect companion to a cold beer on a hot day. Its essentially a meal of dozens of small herring-like fish Sprattus sprattus, salted, coated in flour and deep fried, heads still on and all.

Serve fried sprats with a slice of lemon, some French fries and an ice-cold Bulgarian draught beer and you have created a legendary dish with minimum effort. In summer days, fried sprats are so popular out in the open. Locally, their cult status is only comparable to the institution that is fish and chips in the United Kingdom!