Kosovo restaurant serves up peace and love, one bite at a time

The scene is nearly unimaginable in Kosovo — Serbs, Albanians, NATO peacekeepers and European diplomats all in one room chatting and feasting.

- ISMET HAJDARI, DAVID STOUT

For over a decade, one restaurant has brought together members of Kosovo’s deeply divided communities under its red-tiled roof, even as political unrest and ethnic tensions festered outside.

“No one wants to cause trouble in my restaurant,” Miodrag Nikolic, the owner of the Ethno House inn, told AFP. “Believe it or not, in 12 years, not a single glass has been broken.”

“I don’t think any other restaurant in the world can claim that.”

Located in a Serb minority enclave on the outskirts of the Kosovo capital Pristina, the establishment is just a stone’s throw from the 14th-century Gracanica monastery, a shrine dear to Serbs across the world. Mr Nikolic left his home in Pris

tina for Gracanica when Belgrade was forced to retreat from the breakaway province after NATO intervened in a bloody war in the late 1990s with ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

Those Serbs who stayed in Kosovo mostly flocked to remaining enclaves near Orthodox churches and monasteries like Gracanica or to the Serb majority areas of the north.