“We are not robots,” Satko Ibrahimovic says. “We are humans. We have to be different, and to find beauty in the difference between us.”
He was vacationing in Greece when the Bosnian war erupted; he first saw his hometown under attack by Serb forces on TV. He spent days in his hotel room, glued to the set, exchanging phone calls with his parents in Banja Luka. They were Bosnian Muslims, and when the campaign of ethnic cleansing began, there was no way he could safely go back. “I was completely surprised,” he says. “I was from an educated family, and I was surprised by the primitivism and nationalism that just showed up so abruptly–zoom! We grew up all together, and now I see some people just pretended. It was a big lie.”
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Ibrahimovic met his wife when he was set up on a blind date with one of her friends. The friend asked Richardson to show up at the bar in case she needed to be bailed out. As soon as Richardson walked into Rosa’s Lounge, Ibrahimovic zoomed across the room and hugged her. He was an excitable Bosnian, less than a year in the United States and still working on his English. She was a Madison native and a social worker.
His travels have taken him to more than 50 countries and exposed him to a wide variety of dishes. He talks about the popularity of snails and frogs’ legs in France and remembers eating crickets in Morocco. But will these exotic ingredients ever find their way onto a Bubamara pizza? He rules out crickets, but snails–“We had snails on pizza in Bosnia,” he says.
“People really trust his creative judgment,” says Richardson. “We have some customers who’ll call–actually it gets on my nerves, because they’ll only talk to him. Or they’ll say, ‘Just tell Satko to make me a pizza.’”
