Lokys

Vilnius, Lithuania

Lokys has operated in Vilnius Old Town since 1972, making it the oldest continuously running restaurant in the district. The building is a 15th-century merchant house, with Gothic cellars and vaulted stone rooms that serve as the dining areas. The menu centres on historical Lithuanian cuisine, drawing on recipes from the 14th to 17th centuries when the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth's nobility ate from the forest and the smokehouse. Game, mushrooms, smoked meats, and fermented preparations dominate the card. Skilandis appears as a cold starter, sliced thin and served on dark rye with pickled mushrooms. The atmosphere is deliberately medieval in character without being a theme park.

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Sausages served here

Skilandis

Lithuania

Skilandis is a cold-smoked Lithuanian sausage stuffed not into a casing but into a pig's bladder or stomach. The interior is a coarse mixture of lean pork and fat, seasoned with garlic, salt, and black pepper, pressed firmly into the bladder, then cold-smoked over several weeks and air-dried until the entire mass sets hard and dense. The result is something closer to a salami or cured ham in character than a typical sausage: it is sliced paper-thin with a sharp knife and eaten without cooking. The surface of a cured skilandis is dark and firm; the interior, when cut, shows a deep red-brown with visible flecks of fat. A single bladder-stuffed piece can weigh anywhere from half a kilogram to more than two kilograms. The EU granted it Protected Geographical Indication status in 2009, restricting the name to products made in Lithuania following the traditional method.

porkcold-smokedcured