To Macedonia with Love — Spasia Dinkovski's Mystic Burek
Mystic Burek, on a busy road in Sydenham in South London, feels like it’s been there for decades.
“A lot of people have commented that it feels like you're walking into a nan's house, and that's exactly what I wanted,” says owner Spasia Dinkovski. The decor—net curtains, wood-panelled walls, framed family photos and red-checked tablecloths—definitely leans nanwards.
Spasia quite intentionally wanted to create “a really homely welcoming place that you can sit for hours.” Trinkets and souvenirs line up across a high shelf, including a framed picture of Morley’s, the ubiquitous London chicken shop chain, and the red and yellow sunburst flag of North Macedonia, where Spasia’s parents are from, in miniature. Her burek shop is a little Balkan home-from-home right in the heart of South East London.
The shop’s framed poster of Mystic Pizza—a warm, smalltown coming-of-age film that Spasia was “totally obsessed with”—gives another clue to her aspirations, and also hints at her emotional side.
Travel an hour south from Mystic Burek and you’ll end up in Crawley, Surry, where Spasia grew up. As soon as she could, she got a job at her local kebab restaurant, washing dishes for three pounds an hour and dancing round the tables on command.
“[The dishes] had to be done with cold water, they never had hot water. My mum was like, you don't have to do this. Everything's okay. You don't need to bring money home.” Spasia tells me, but even then she was keenly aware of a desire to graft.
As she explored other avenues—a creative writing degree, a job at the Macedonian Arts Council in New York—kitchens still called to her. She “kind of got hooked” working at Pizza Express while at Staffordshire University and parlayed a job at a Brooklyn deli into SLAP!, a sandwich-making service and her first business.
It was in New York that Spasia noticed the commonality between pizza joints and burek shops: casual, open-all-hours, beloved by boozers. “It's that place you go to get something accessible, something cheap to soak it all up,” she says.
“ “Go to Bosnia and ask for a burek with cheese, suddenly you’re waking up in the ER with multiple life-threatening wounds.””
After her visa ran out, she moved to London and brought SLAP! with her to Dalston Superstore, while also working at a number of places including Bodega Rita’s and cheesemonger Paxton & Whitfield.
Fast-forward to 2020, and Spasia—recently-furloughed and looking for something to do—started making bureks and posting them on Instagram. Before long, the likes and comments snowballed into a business. Spasia was taking orders and dropping off pies around London, including a stint selling burek out of the back of her friend’s car.
“The first place we did that was Notting Hill. People were just like, wandering over with umbrellas going, ‘what's going on here?’” she says.
Her shop space, which opened in September last year, now serves up to 70 pies a week and offers her British-Balkan take on burek, with fillings such as lamb and peppers or spinach, Kashkaval cheese and wild garlic, as well as dips, sides and Balkan snacks.
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At its core a burek is a yufka (or phyllo pastry) pie, often filled with an egg and cheese mixture, (but sometimes vegetables or meat) and usually (but not always) rolled into a spiral before baking. Take a glancing look at the AskBalkans subReddit and you’ll get an idea of the roiling debates on the proper name and correct filling for bureks.
“Go to Bosnia and ask for a burek with cheese, suddenly you're waking up in the ER with multiple life-threatening wounds, I don't think we even agree on burek,” one Redditor said.
“You said a pita is a burek, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all pitas bureks, which means you'd call maslenice, mantije, and other meals with jufka bureks, too! Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?”
You get the idea.
Illustrations by Barrie Jones
One thing many Balkan countries agree on, including Macedonia, is that burek should be served with a yoghurt drink like Ayran.
“Burek, for me, has to come in a round,” says fermentation expert Jelena Belgrave, who is from Serbia but has been living in London for 20 years. She describes the large circular dishes: “You compile your burek and then you would drench it, literally just pour lard over it, and any extra you would pour onto the next tray and then the next tray. That's why it's important to eat it while it's hot!”
Burek is the legacy of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. The first recorded burek recipe dates back to 1498, written by Mehmed Oglu, a renowned baker from Istanbul who ran a pastry shop in Niš, a city in south-east Serbia. The burek’s influence stretches to Crete—where it's called boureki and filled with courgette, potatoes, mint and mizithra (a local cheese)—and to Albania where byrek is often made with meat, pumpkin or foraged greens such as nettles.
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For Spasia, the move from sandwich slinger to burek maker was something that had been bubbling under for a while. After the death of her beloved grandmother—who she describes as a classic nan, “all loving, always there for you”—Spasia inherited her recipe book.
At first, she couldn’t even bear to open it but when she finally did, “it was an absolute mess,” she says. “It's basically a phone book that she's made notes in, but it’s mixed with numbers of her mates, pictures of me, there’s an old advert from a Hoover company,” she says. “She didn't write that recipe book for anyone else but herself.”
““Grief forced me to accept what impact loss can have on your perception of home.” ”
Flanked by Bulgaria and Albania, with Serbia above and Greece below, North Macedonia’s climate produces fruit and vegetables that hardly need adornment. The cuisine of this small, mountainous country is a mix of Balkan, Ottoman, Mediterranean and Greek influences and features simple dishes that let the excellent produce take centre stage. Bread and grilled meats feature heavily, as well as a wide range of cheeses and pickles.
Spasia’s love for Macedonia and desire to preserve its ways really comes through in Doma, her first cookbook, which offers a journey through Macedonian food and culture, filtered through Spasia’s British-Macedonian lens. It’s filled with vivid snippets and details, such as the way her grandmother cooled her bureks by resting them on 4-5 glasses to keep a crispy base.
At first, Spasia tried to imagine some grand idea that she could turn into a book before realising that what she should write about was right in front of her.
“Grief forced me to accept what impact loss can have on your perception of home,” she says. “I just totally overlooked the fact that there's a story already there.”
Growing up with a mix of cultures can make it hard to be fully at home in your identity. There’s an ever-present feeling that you might get caught out not being enough of one thing or the other. As a child, Spasia felt like Macedonia belonged to her parents or her cousins there. “It was never mine”, she says. The process of writing the book and the research was transformative, Spasia was now able to stake a claim, “I made Macedonia my own.” On her latest trip just before the book came out, her mum was surprised to see Spasia “[sounding] Macedonian, behaving Macedonian—mannerisms and ordering stuff in restaurants.”
There are bureks of course, but the book also features Balkan staples such as ajvar—the roasted red pepper condiment that goes on everything—and family dishes such as great aunt Suze’s sour cherry baklava. There are also plenty of Spasia creations, like her Vegeta chicken wings, honouring the beloved Yugoslavian seasoning.
Doma also features interviews with producers and restaurateurs. Toni, who runs a kefana, Macedonia’s equivalent to a taverna, just outside Skopje, is a big inspiration for Spasia. Frosina—named after Toni’s wife, the head chef—is the archetype of the kind of places Spasia spent her childhood in, falling asleep under the table while the adults danced into the night. At Frosina, they breed their own pigs and, because it's often cheaper, source ingredients locally from small artisan producers.
Spasia refers to kefanas as “bustling relics,” a familial spot where you’re served meze after meze, often with a generous ration of booze. “You don't see young people waiting tables. Toni was like, ‘my children just don't want to do it. Yeah, they want to move abroad.’ There is a heavy sense that the older generation is still there, but they're hanging on.’’ She describes the idea that these places might disappear as “terrifying.”
It’s easy to see why Spasia prizes these kinds of places. For a few weeks every year, or every few years, she bathes in it, soaks it all up and then when she’s back in Britain, it’s gone. She knows more than most what the loss of these ways will mean. “I think everyone there is on the edge of what is happening, things are going to change really quickly,” she says.
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The next time I get back in touch with Spasia she apologises for the delay because she’s been helping a staff member from Serbia who got scammed. “I’ve just been doing that all day”, she says, “bless him.”
This warm-hearted generosity runs through everything Spasia does. Caitlin Isola—who is responsible for the instantly recognisable Mystic Burek photography—describes Spasia turning up for their first shoot with a box of props and a huge stack of bureks in pizza boxes, “I was just like, there’s so much food! What are we gonna do?”, she says. Spasia tells her to keep the lot, explaining that burek freezes brilliantly.
““I can’t tell you how many of those bureks I’ve eaten, but every single time I do I’m like, this is still amazing. They’re getting better.””
The other thread that runs through everything is Spasia’s work ethic. Now she owns a successful food business, people come to her for advice. What she has to offer is simple and reflective of a lot of children of migrants.
“Hopefully the food's delicious—first off—but also there's no other answer but really hard work,” she says. “There are other ways around it, but they're not ways that I would go down.”
It was that sense of graft that Caitlin says inspired her to first contact Spasia to work together. “I could see how much soul she was pouring into this stuff,” she says.
In the flesh, there is something reassuringly old school about Spasia Dinkovski. It wouldn’t be a shock to see her pull out a roll of notes to pay for something, like a hard-graft, cash-in-hand dad, instead of tapping her phone. “I know everyone, everyone knows me. I made sure of that. A lot of people wouldn’t do that”, she says, of the community she has built in Sydenham.
Her friend Danny Eilenberg—who runs Halfcut Market, a wine shop and mini-mart in North London—describes Spasia as an “incredibly hard worker who is very, very well prepared, very diligent and also just a pleasure to be around.” The secret to her popularity is her “integrity”. “That’s what’s really compelling and makes her so interesting,” he adds. This is something echoed by Caitlin: “She’s just real and she doesn't fuck around”, she says.
When I ask Danny about the Mystic Burek opening party, it’s clear it was an emotional event. “I was in bits that night, it was so lovely, so special,” he replies, adding, “it [was] literally her family and friends. No journalists, no PR, no industry. I think that's the ethos of what she's doing.”
It’s evident that for Spasia, it’s not just about the food—it’s about bringing the whole experience of a burek shop. “It's about sustenance and sharing that feeling of home,” Danny says. He goes on to list the ways in which Spasia could upsell her bureks, but he knows that’s not her aim. “For her it’s about not adulterating it”.
Ed McIlroy, who runs The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, describes the shop as “magic.”
“I can't tell you how many of those bureks I've eaten, but every single time I do I'm like, this is still amazing. They're getting better.” he tells me. “That's the thing, she's always tweaking, she’s always like, ‘I changed this, changed that.’”
There are plans afoot. The shop—which has turned into a hub for Balkan immigrants—will eventually move across the road, to a bigger establishment where she can offer more of a restaurant feel with a wider range of plated dishes. She also has plans for Balkan disco nights, or Balkan karaoke. There’s a big garden too which she wants to use for ajvar-making classes.
In a city where the choice for food is swimming with places that have been franchised to death, Mystic Burek stands out. Through the shop, and Doma, Spasia has articulated her Balkan-British heritage but also given us old-fashioned hospitality that resonates in both cultures. Recounting a recent conversation with a friend, Spasia describes the mild telling off she gets: “Your ancestors were humble enough, now’s the time to like, own it and big up yourself.”
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