Lacrimi și Sfinți

Lacrimi și Sfinți — 'tears and saints' — is the restaurant the Romanian poet and cultural figure Mircea Dinescu helped open in Bucharest's Old Town (Lipscani). It sits on Strada Șepcari, a three-minute walk from Unirii Square, in a restored nineteenth-century building with original tile floors and a small courtyard garden. The concept is contemporary Romanian — 100-year-old family recipes sourced from archives and grandmothers across the country, reinterpreted and repositioned for a modern diner.

The cooking is careful and specific. Dinescu's literary involvement is not cosmetic — the menu descriptions carry his voice, the ingredient sourcing runs through a network of rural producers he has built over decades, and the wine list includes small-producer Romanian bottles that would be invisible without his personal advocacy. Signatures include a painstakingly reconstructed 1920s Bucharest-style duck dish, a ciorbă (sour soup) with smoked goose that changes monthly, and a Romanian-ricotta dumpling dessert that is one of the most-ordered plates in the city.

The dining room is small and densely atmospheric — stone walls, wooden beams, candlelight, thirty-two seats across the main hall and the small inner garden courtyard. The courtyard is the most romantic summer-evening dining space in the Old Town; the main hall in winter is the winter equivalent.

Lacrimi și Sfinți is consistently one of the top-rated restaurants on Tripadvisor Bucharest. Reservations are recommended for weekend dinner but walk-ins are genuinely possible most weeknights. The wine list is short, Romanian-forward, and remarkably well-priced.

A candlelit Old Town room, 100-year-old recipes reinterpreted by chefs working off Mircea Dinescu's ingredient network, a courtyard garden in summer, and a price point that makes two glasses of wine and three courses a €40 proposition — Lacrimi și Sfinți is the First Date room in Bucharest. Book the courtyard in summer; the main hall corner table in winter.