The Flavours of Croatian Tradition is a project realised in cooperation between county and local tourist boards and DMK Vall042. The goal of this project is to enrich Croatia’s tourist offerings and develop new products in the tourism sector. The flavours and scents of local cuisine, world-class wines, beverages, and home-grown farm produce are an essential component of the value and quality of the tourist offerings of a given region today. This project is focused on developing tourist products founded on these prerequisites. Offerings in wine and gourmet tourism are viewed as a wider concept uniting farming, cuisine, oenology, and culture, which makes them an exceptionally important component of sustainable development.
The basic goal is to advance the selection of traditional local meals, drinks, and products available in the daily selection of food & beverage outlets. Building on this basis, we intend to contribute to the development of wine and gourmet food tourism and the labelling and creation of strong market recognisability for food & beverage outlets that bear the Flavours standard, as well as of their identity as places that guarantee and offer authentic local dishes, beverages, and traditional homemade products.
The end goal is the continuity and sustainability of quality, excellence, and innovation in the use of traditional ingredients, and finally the design of themed restaurants – restaurants with tradition that will constantly offer multiple typical local dishes while also offering guests the ability to actively participate in the selection and preparation of food and beverages.
The Flavours standard is actually the construction of a shared identity for the experience of local meals, beverages, and products, with a promise to guests that the labelled facility offers a daily selection of traditional food and drink.
The criteria for the standard is defined by the Regulations. The standard can be issued to a food & beverage outlet that has operated for a minimum of three years, as a rule, and which satisfies the following minimum conditions: it offers at least two local traditional dishes daily and six brands of beverage, of which at least four are wines, and wins a minimum of 75 of 100 points during the rating process (which is executed in five categories: Food, Service, Beverages, Atmosphere, and Surroundings, each of which consists of five criteria).
The standard can be awarded to the following facilities: family farms, tasting rooms, traditional folk houses, bistros, inns, restaurants, cafés, and hotels. The bearer of the standard is marked with a typified plaque, which contains the trademarked sign and logo, the local or regional name of the project in Croatian, and the text Flavours of Croatian Tradition in English.
In cooperation and partnership with county tourist boards, the first standards were distributed in 2015 to facilities in Vukovar-Syrmia County and Varaždin County, followed by Požega-Slavonia County, Krapina-Zagorje County, Zagreb County, Sisak-Moslavina County, Koprivnica-Križevci County, Brod-Posavina County, Lika-Senj County, the city of Zagreb, and in 2019 Bjelovar-Bilogora County, Šibenik-Knin and Dubrovnik-Neretva County. The Flavours standard currently encompasses 127 facilities across 13 counties. During 2018 and 2019, the project will continue in eight new counties, and the completion of the project’s first phase in 2019 will encompass all counties in Croatia.
For more information, visit www.okusi.hr
