Honey of the Vale: Mead Caramel, Penteleu Cream, Burnt Onion Ash

In 2014, Cristina and Mihai Negoț left Bucharest for the Buzău Valley with five beehives they'd received as a wedding gift. Out of those grew Primitiv Foods — honey first, then jars of raw honey with dried fruit and nuts, made in their Pătârlagele workshop, opened in 2017. The mead idea came from a trip to London: there they tasted a different kind of mead — fresh, lightly sparkling, just 5% alcohol — nothing like the heavy, sweet drink they knew. In 2022 they launched Romania's first low-alcohol mead, fermented from their own bees' honey, with nothing artificial added. In February 2024 their mead took gold at the Mead Madness Cup in Poland — the world's biggest mead competition. At the conac you'll find it by the glass alongside the Farm-to-Table menu, and by the bottle in our shop.

In Nehoiu, at the foot of the Penteleu mountains, Norica and Viorel Urjan have brought back the cheese that once made this valley famous. The recipe is the authentic one: Norica learned it decades ago at the old Nehoiu dairy factory, under a Macedonian master cheesemaker. The milk comes from the family's 14 cows, grazing mountain pasture. The cașcaval — a pressed mountain cheese — is matured at the old, unhurried rhythm, the way it was made when Penteleu was a name known across Romania. At the conac you'll find it on the cheese boards and in our shop, by the kilogram.