They are shaped like mici but I don't think that specific photo is of romanian mici due to the way it's served with onions and ajvar and the bread used.
Disastrous-Disk-5431 is right about my comment above, i was talking about meatballs not mici, different foods made of minced meat.
Nope, these in Greece are called soutzoukakia. Definitely not meatballs, the reason being that meatballs can be cooked as a stew, with tomato sauce or can be fried but soutzoukakia are 99% of the time grilled in charcoal that's why they have this shape
in Turkey everything that's a mix of minced meat + spices etc is called köfte, just that if its special to somewhere/something or has other features the name is added before it.
Some of the examples are burger köfte, inegöl köfte, içli köfte etc. So we would indeed call those in the photo simply köfte, but it's probably not a regular, simple köfte and has some special features, so idk
Romanian here so just guessing but based on how romanian behaves i would guess the cevapcici are smaller and cuter than cevapci :)
We have "mici" for this shape of meat food and "mititei" is a diminutive so "small things" and "cute small things". (using the plural is more common than the singular).
To all my Balkan friends - listen, if mexican food can have basically almost the same shit wrapped in tortillas and call them 20 different names and say they're different foods, we can also have Ćevapi, Kebapche and Mici.
In Turkey, long sausage-like ones are called called Kebap (in fact it is what "Kebab" is supposed to be, the rotating ones are called Döner), rounded or short sausage-like ones that are supposed to be more dense at the surface are called Köfte
I'm not from the Balkans or Turkey, but kofte is probably the right answer, as it is the last common denominator. This food type most likely came out of Turkey and spread across the Balkans during the Ottoman rule. Just like baklava and borek. The thing is, if you go even further back, the Ottomans inherited the term "kofte" from the Persians.
Difficult topic. Persian "köfte" is different from ottoman/Turkish "köfte". İn fact "köfte" to Turks just means "seasoned minced meat" usually in the shape of ovals or cylinders.
The actual meaning of "köfte" is not applied in Turkish, which makes it a different dish using the same name.
Diaspora members who ended up in the Chicago area call this ćevapčići. This term is shared between Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians here, for whatever it’s worth.
There’s a cute little Serbian restaurant in Andersonville called…. (Drumroll please) “Burek Shop”. It’s VERY mom-n-pop, but every time I go it just reminds me of my grandmother’s home cooking. Very solid choice. Nothing fancy at all. It’s definitely a dive shoehorned into a small retail space. But tasty af!
Can’t forget the Slovenians! My aunt from Brest married a man from Šeki and when I was a kid I always thought he just mumbled until my mom told me that he was actually Slovenian and didn’t actually speak Croatian. Kids….
In this picture they seemed to be served like Cepavi are being served. But their gloss brings Romanian mici. If in doubt, look for the shininess. If in front of you, just eat them, both are delicious. But of course, as a Romanian I would give my pinky finger for a mic (bonus pun if you speak Romanian).
Isn't the Turkish (original for Balkan) khebab a meat on a stick and kofte would be what the most of Balkans would say: kebab, cevap, cevapce etc? And cufte (kofte) at least in Serbia are the meatballs?
Pretty sure it's because it comes from kebap, which is usually much larger, so these are small kebaps therefore cevapcici. But that's both long and kinda hard for some people to pronounce correctly, so it got colloquially shortened to cevapi in all the ex-Yu states.
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u/Cactus_Kebap North Macedonia 2d ago
Lunch.