Broom 44

Vegan soparnik is the dish to start with at Broom 44, a small brunch bistro standing forty-four steps below Zagreb's Dolac market.

A plant-based brunch bar beside Dolac

Broom 44 is compact and market-adjacent rather than a broad all-day restaurant. It sits on the wide stairs that climb from the city centre to the Dolac plateau, at the forty-fourth step, which is where the name comes from and why the room fills with people on their way to or from the stalls.

The kitchen is vegetarian and vegan, built for breakfast and brunch, and it works in two registers. One is the long-running staple: vegan soparnik, the Dalmatian chard pie rendered without dairy or egg. The other is seasonal and moves through the year: a katsu tofu sandwich with spring onion mayonnaise, pickled vegetables and tahini paste; a celery kebab; homemade pasta in tomato sauce.

Coffee, terrace and a weekend queue

The drinks programme carries as much weight as the food. Specialty coffee comes from Fildž Coffee and is poured with almond, soy or oat milk as readily as with dairy, and the rest of the list runs to tea, freshly squeezed juice, smoothies and organic wine, so brunch can keep going past the plates.

The room is small and the terrace is the prize on a warm day, even after changes to the market stalls altered the view from it. Weekends bring a wait, which is the honest cost of a bistro this size with this kind of following. Go early, or go midweek and take the table outside.

Order the soparnik, then follow the season

Vegan soparnik is the most distinctive first order, a named long-runner that connects the menu to a local savoury tradition in plant-based form. It is also the dish that explains the kitchen's approach fastest: Croatian, familiar, rebuilt without animal products and not apologising for it.

After that, follow whatever the seasonal board is doing. The katsu tofu sandwich is the most substantial of the named dishes, layering tofu with spring onion mayonnaise, pickled vegetables and tahini. The celery kebab is the more vegetable-forward main, and the homemade pasta in tomato sauce is the simplest thing on the list. Take a Fildž coffee with any of them, or a fresh juice if the climb up to Dolac is still ahead.