A broken man, Split (Croatia)

The festivities in Hvar were the tipping point beyond which my immune system could no longer cope. I woke up on the Saturday very early to catch my ferry to Split feeling run down. A cold was coming on. Even though there isn’t a great deal to do in Split, I was going to use the two days I had there to try and recover and ward off this cold by doing almost nothing (it didn’t work by the way). Most towns in Croatia seem to have an ‘Old Town’ within them. Split is no exception. This is most definitely the nicest part of Split that I saw. I wandered outside the walls to nearby residential areas and they were rather rundown and unappealing. The port had a few large cruise liners or ferries in it each day. Tour groups were constantly clogging the narrow old streets. 

Kononbe Joze

Reviews sounded great. After my poor spaghetti marina for lunch (at Konoba Nevera)I was keen to make amends. So I doubled down and ordered it again, this time with green fettuccini (fresh and very good). The seafood was fairly good (better than the fancy marinara mix for lunch, including seafood stick! Do you know who I am???) but the sauce was a weird one. White wine based, overly salty but tolerable. That and a €2.00 250ml carafe of house wine and I was reasonably content. Everybody else seemed to be very happy with their meals. I wanted to come back and try something else.

The following night I ordered the seafood risotto instead. Big mistake. Firstly, it wasn’t a risotto but a sloppy mess and secondly, they used exactly the same sauce as with the fettuccine the night before. Wtf! So I basically had a bad version of the previous night’s meal. Disappointed. Again, others seemed happy. Unlucky ordering perhaps. The black squid ink pasta looked great. Some fried rice dish thing (don’t recall reading on menu) looked ok. You can have scampi pasta (scampi were delicious – never had before), mussels by weight, lobster, fish etc. I’m confident it is a good shop – just don’t order the risotto. Croatia can’t make them to save themselves.

The awfully smelly fish market

The Green market

A man scraping mussels off from the side of the wharf with a funky pool leaf scoop