Gluten-Free Ribs

To be honest, I don’t quite understand what this gluten-free thing is about. Fine, you cannot stand something (like I hate tuna, for instance) – then do not order it. It does not matter if your problem is a personal dislike or a medical condition. It does not mean that what you cannot eat is unhealthy. Unhealthy to you, perhaps, but not to the rest of the world. That is why a gluten-free restaurant sounds like an idiosyncrasy to me. Come on, many more people have an allergy to cats than gluten intolerance, yet how many cat-free restaurants are out there?

However, the gluten-free nature of Dežela Okusov was simply a late discovery. What I was looking for was merely a restaurant in Ljubljana that was open after 9 p.m. and hopefully served something I like, such as a Brettljause or spare ribs. Finding Dežela Okusov was in fact a very good luck.

I knew that the spare ribs would be good the moment they arrived at my table. They smelled right – of being freshly grilled and of having a good marinade. The marinade was indeed excellent, flavoring the meat in such a way that it was highly enjoyable by itself, without any side dishes or sauces. The meat had obviously been slowly cooked, for it was tender and detached itself from the bones fairly easily. Still, I could not resist taking the bones by the hand and sucking the marinade off them, so tasty it was, despite the fact that the ribs were quite oily and made my fingers disgustingly greasy.

The ketchup, on the other hand, was rudimentary and only useful as a dip for the French fries, which by themselves were not very useful. Had the ribs been served with some special gluten-free salad or more interesting potatoes, I could have even given them more points. The way they were, however, I am happy to report that as long as gluten-free restaurants serve the same quality of food as Dežela Okusov, they neither scare nor annoy me.