The bar is actually a restaurant and has been a favourite spot for tourists and locals alike for over 10 years. There you can try the most delicious meatballs and kebabs, traditional ‘Snezhanka’ and ‘Shopska’ salad, ‘Gypsy’ pastry and hundreds of types of rakia. And the genuinely entertaining waiters are famous for their clever jokes, broad smiles and bottles of rakia in their pockets. 

Raketa Rakia Bar is the most popular and trendy restaurant and bar, featuring a nostalgic interior inspired by socialist-era culture. The experience is a combination of uncompromisingly delicious food and the feeling that you’re in a museum of a bygone era. Only there can you touch a real grenade, dine beneath a portrait of Todor Zhivkov, or see what televisions, vacuum cleaners and irons looked like in the 1950s. 

The Bulgarian actor Ivan Ivanov puts it best in the 1979 film *Everything Is Love*: “I don’t know what happiness is, but I know this: if a person wants something to happen again, it means they enjoyed it.” It is no coincidence that this phrase has become the slogan of the Raketa Rakia bar; everyone returns, once they have tasted the flavour of modern Sofia’s socialist era.