Na oko - Adventures in Village Cooking from Bulgaria's Forgotten Corners

Rory Miller - Na oko - Adventures in Village Cooking from Bulgaria's Forgotten Corners

I set out with a simple goal: to gather authentic material from Bulgarian villages firsthand, to have meaningful conversa­tions with the locals, and to learn not just how to cook but how to apprecia­te the weighty, delicious dishes that def­ine their tables. Instead, I stumbled upon something far more vital—fragments of humanity, a quiet persistence of spirit, and the flickering lights of souls in the dark. 

I wanted to listen and write without ego but with an understanding, however brief, of what the everyday looks like for the many people I met along the way. At the very least, I owed them the courtesy of shutting up and paying attention. Over the years, this book has grown beyond me, beyond its original vision, evolving into something with a life of its own. What began as a project has become a journey, one that I’ve followed rather than led.

The Bulgarian phrase Na Oko—“by eye,” used in cooking when precise measurements are tossed aside in favor of intuition—first led me to these villages. But it didn’t take long to realize that those two simple words have very little to do with food and everything to do with life itself. That’s what I’ve tried to capture here in words, in images, and in the spaces between them. 

A Tacoma boy, born and raised, Rory Miller had the kind of teenage years that make for great stories if not always based on great decisions. A string of unfortunate incidents (and a few lawsuits) prompted a swift exit to Italy at 19, where he instantly decided never to look back.

Having held jobs as a construction grunt, a pier­cer, an olive picker, and an English teacher, among other odd and perhaps even more questionable professions, Rory regrets none of them because each one offered its own strange charm. The last two decades have seen him roaming the depths of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where his life of spontaneity took an unexpected turn.

More than 15 years ago, he set foot in Bulgaria for the first time, and the country refused to let him go. His fascination with the language, culture, and people only grew deeper and more entrenched over time, and any illusion of leaving vanished for good when his son was born.

Somewhere along the way, he accidentally launched Bulgaria’s first craft beer brands and founded a collection of culinary projects, music and beer festivals, and underground cinema ex­periments—some more successfully than others. Out of the blue came an invitation to MasterChef Bulgaria, which dragged Rory out of the shadows and into the culinary limelight. From there, he took his love of American comfort food, twisted it into his own version of North American cuisine, and worked as a chef in various restaurants. He kept cooking, kept creating, and, most importantly, kept eating.

Since this book’s inception, the world has shifted. While living through a pandemic, a war, and that never-ending struggle to balance finishing the damn thing while raising a child and maintaining a shred of sanity, somehow he found himself volunteering: supporting local hospitals during the pandemic, transporting humanitarian aid to affected areas in Ukraine, and helping refugees relocate to Bulgaria. Doing good whenever and wherever he could, felt like the only rational response to an increasingly irrational world.

Above all, nothing outranks his kids. Everything else—projects, deadlines, culinary ambitions—comes second. And if that means this book took longer than expected, you can blame the kids. They won’t mind.