20-X-2019.
Two days ago went to Springfield again. The standard runaround. The girls are getting used to the helical slide, good fun. Vesna tried to help, but they don't trust her, no contact.
Wrote the first version of api_posetu.prg, after it finally dawned on me that Statcounter must have an API. Sure enough it did, and it turned out to be something equally simple, in terms of json returned, as the hfea stuff I did in Firriver, except I didn't have to POST anything, it's all in the url. Tried to steal my old code but, alas, it was all left on one of the new servers, I didn't download any backups for myself. But then it was all so simple, that I did it all in one day.
In the afternoon we all got into the van and went to Trofej, a restaurant just a dozen kilometers south of town. It has a long tradition - and the new owners (probably third or fourth after the legendary founder) weren't up to it. The extremely long summer caught them by the surprise, so they reduced the number of staff. We also made a mistake of arriving around 16:20, right between lunch and dinner, and second mistake of ordering from the list of house specials, correctly assuming they'd have them ready. Except it was all tepid at best, almost cold, didn't even talk with mirko a bit, the čorba would be nice at at least 10°C higher. The ribs that Nina and I had weren't that bad, but we ate much better ones elsewhere; the fries were cold and limp, not crunchy at all. On top of it, the ham shanks (aka butkice) with horse radish sauce that she has ordered came without sauce. The worst part was that I had to hear her complaints over and over in the following week or two, as she'd bitch to anyone willing to listen. I also reported the case at burundi, there's no bad advertising.
So it's a restaurant with a hefty history, called „Trofej“ [trophy] and is located at 13km before Zrenjanin coming from belgradely side, by the exit to Carska Bara. It was built by the end of the seventies by one Živojin Mađarev and named it after his nickname, „Živa Mađarica“. Of course in Belgrade nobody knew how to pronounce it with proper banatian accent [i.e. emphasis aka stress] - Živa should be with long ascending, not short descending on i, and mađarIca with short descending, as the male nicknames ending with -ica are pronounced here (like Todorica, Bataljica and such). [so it meant „live[ly] hungarian woman“ when so mispronounced]
Before that he had a restaurant „Lala“, where the old road to Novi leaves town, which is some 300m north of the current road. He hired the famous architect Berbakov to do something modern yet in banatian style, which came out swimmingly. The city fathers liked it so much, that they hired the same architect to design the Bagljaš novogradnja in the same style, to fit with the restaurant. Then it came out as somewhat uneasy to have a whole city quart in the tavern's style, and it being the best tavern in town, while the tavern is owned by a privatnik. So they convinced Živa to sell the tavern to HE (hospitality enterprise) „Vojvodina“ (which held the hotels, kaštel and few other places), which then turned the place, not changing anything into the style, into a practical training grounds for the hospitality high school, so their waiters were always top notch.
He moved his business to the belgrade road, named it after himselfs, and.. bingo. The place was mostly full, specially from the south, because who'll explain to the deaf the fine points of accent. „And where's the Mađarica?“ (hungarian girl)... „They drag their feet with her labor permit, what are they doing [a highly local expletive here]“.
Later I heard that mr Živa regularly took the kids from the church choir to a vacation by the sea at his own expense. This way, they say, his way to wash his biography, because the whole town knew that his sister Keka (a nickname of unknown origin, nobody knew) was the first lady of the city prostitution, she always had the girls. Now whether the legend of the green bottle was about her or of the equally famous Dara Pindara, I wouldn't know.
All the personae mentioned must have thrown their spoonlets already, and the new owners have significantly expanded the tavern. The old building is probably just one wing of it, and the whole construction is so spread out that I fail to see what's the old part there. There's a whole ethno park now, with the usual tidbits - cart wheels, fake đeram fwell with a tall seesaw to pull out the bucket], even a small zoo (rabbits, 1 ostrich, 1 young deer, kids, hens, ducks). The bear is gone, they eliminated it a few years ago, when it killed the woman who fed it.
The atmosphere was OK last time, because then we used only the playground, didn't even look for a table, there was some kid's birthday, all taken. This time we decided to lunch, and that was the beginning of the fuckup, the twins just decided to take a nap at the wrong time, so we were around the table eventually at 15:50, after skipping breakfast. The waiter was okay but... at every turn we had to wait for him a little longer, because he bussed some eight tables, and had to walk a lot, every minute someone would need something, fuckit it was mostly people with children. Small ones, who don't know in advance what they'd like to have ten minutes later. So he brought water and menu and by defo two glasses, asked how many more glasses we needed, we said three... and he brought two. Asked for fries, said „comes with“ and left. Next pass „we misunderstood each other, an extra plate of just fries for the kids“. That arrived after the main course, so the kids were hungry and had to wait for čorba to pass first. The čorba was not bad (and he first brought one too many, which we didn't order, thanked us for clearing the confusion for him), but rather tepid, and didn't bring the karafindl.
[my guess, missing in the original article, was that they thought the season was over so they reduced the staff to winter levels; long summer caught them unprepared]
And the main course - for daughter and me deboned ribs with kajmak, not bad, but in „Pitch“ it's a whole class better, first of all because it arrives hot. This was tepid, almost cold, and the fries were limp. Good knives to a rescue - not the chinese flimsy pieces of thin sheet metal with lasered blade, this is one piece of good steel - and good flatbreads of real somun type dough, not the standard bleached sponge. My maam ordered butkice with horseradish sauce, it arrived likewise alnost cold, and no sauce no horseradish. She spewed a footlong tirade at the waiter and refused to eat... And the disk is 1kg of meat, they don't sell it at halves, so now we have a kilo of it in the fridge, can do cold.
Then we started recolecting what we saw around, the things we noticed. It seems they are trying to return the investment. Half of the props on the kids' playground were in need of repair - specially the tower, where there's a spot, at at least 2m height, there's no banister. Guess the slide was hooked to it and then vanished. Screws outstanding in many places, planks cracked or the plywood's layers split (needs to be stained for each season). There's not one complete bench, slats missing everywhere. One low bench which bore sitting was all awry, sit with caution.
Maybe they're good during the rush hour, don't lunch at half five between two rushes. Prices are so-so, 10-15% above the expected, for three factors: location, location, location.
Juding by the licence plates on the parking [lot], mostly belgrade tags and five bikers from Timişoara.
And the legend of the green bottle is pure zrenjanin folklore. There was a tavern „Jagnje“ (lamb) near the beginning of Đure Jakšića street, which was rather vacant most of the day, throughout the sixties and seventies while it operated, but at nights it would be chock full. They even had some music, with emphasis on a young and extrovert girl singer. One of the aforemetioned two ladies would, as the highlight of the programme, do a strip tease, and by the end of it, a green, always green, opened bottle of beer would arrive (emphasis on opened - the stoppers on zrenjaninsko beer were of mean steel), and then she would, guess while dancing on the stage, insert that bottle into her cunt. That bottle would then be sold to the highest bidder, at probably triple price or higher. The winner would first lick the bottleneck and then savour the contents of the bottle. It's understood that by that time all present were extensively drunk.
The whole town knew this story. Even in the nineties you could tell, when several bottles of beer arrive on the table, some among them green, who are Zrenjaninians - the guys who quickly grab the brown bottles, lest they be saddled with green.
Mentions: 09-VI-1984., Ten years reunion, 15-I-1988., 06-XI-2012., api_posetu.prg, burundi, butkice, čorba, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), HFEA, kajmak, karafindl, kaštel, mirko, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Novi Sad, novogradnja, Pitch kettle, Springfield, Vesna, in serbian
6-XII-2019 - 2-IX-2026