Boškinac

Precision carried to Pag

The knife work stays close to the bench at Boškinac in Novalja, where executive chef Matija Bregeš works Pag island produce through careful cuts, steady attention, and a craft that stays near the material itself. He arrived in 2016 after a first island season, then spent a year training with chefs across Europe before returning to hold the island's tradition and modern technique in the same kitchen.

The restaurant is built around the island rather than apart from it. The house sits within a boutique hotel and winery property founded by Boris Šuljić, whose winery began in 2000 and whose restaurant opened in 2003. Its early kitchen drew on French technique through Stéphan Macchi and Dino Galvagno, then continued toward a modern language of Pag ingredients.

Island ingredients under a tasting-menu method

The program works through tasting menus rather than the scatter of a broad carte. The fine dining restaurant offers 3, 5, or 7-course formats, with one route centered on Pag island ingredients and another shaped by the chef’s personal experience. That architecture gives the kitchen room to return to the same materials from different angles: Pag lamb, octopus, hake, fish from the Podvelebit channel, sheep’s cheese, olive oil, vegetables, asparagus, shellfish, and herbs pulled from the fields around Novalja.

The method is modern, but the pantry is not abstract. Sea bass carpaccio, scallops and shrimp with béchamel and Pag sheep’s cheese, monkfish in tomato sauce, lamb, octopus, and hake all point back to a place of rock, salt, wind, and sparse pasture. The wine pairing is part of the craft here, not a garnish. Boškinac’s restaurant grew beside the winery, and the cellar gives the kitchen an immediate partner in Gegić, Ocu, Boškinac, and Boškinčić. The house holds 1 Michelin star, earned at this address in 2020, and the number matters because the cooking remains tied to the island that made it possible.

The room above the vines

The room is contemporary and warm, with the formality of a tasting menu softened by stone, vineyard views, olive groves, and the quiet of the property around it. Boškinac is 700 meters from the sea and 2 km from Novalja, close enough to the coast to taste salt in the story, far enough from the bustle for the pass to keep its own tempo. The terrace looks over vines rather than traffic. Inside, the work feels measured: plates move through the pass, wine follows the sequence, and the room holds its volume low.

This is the useful texture of the place. The kitchen does not need to perform rusticity, because Pag is already in the lamb, the cheese, the oil, the fish, the herbs, and the wind outside the dining room. The craft itself closes the meal: a course of Pag lamb, a pour of Ocu, and the room at Boškinac holding steady above the Novalja vines.