The sun has gone down in Sarajevo and I'm shivering in the cool autumn air. I didn't think to bring a jacket when we left the hotel. Just yesterday we were swimming in the Adriatic and tanning on a beach in Dubrovnik. I'm starving, too. Our four-hour train ride from the coast took closer to six to climb through the misty Dinaric Alps lining the border between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—not that we'd complain, since the round-trip tickets cost all of 55 kuna ($11) each back in Croatia. By the time we check into our hotel and find an ATM that will accept our bank card, our stomachs are rumbling.

But it's late, and the waiters in all of the restaurants we try turn us away with smiling but firm regrets. Our search for food takes us into the Baščaršija area, the Turkish bazaar at the heart of the city's old town. As we navigate its narrow lanes paved with jumbled cobblestones, my wife wonders aloud if Sarajevan women dare to wear high heels. Many of the stalls are still open despite the late hour, but we agree to forgo browsing until the morning.

Finally, after glimpsing a warm glow down an otherwise dark side street, we find a tiny bistro packed with men drinking beer. All the tables are taken, but as we consider our options, an older gentleman walks out toward us. Hearing us speaking English, he stops to welcome us to Sarajevo. He says he has spent the past four winters “summering” in California but comes home to Sarajevo each year. His welcome warms us, but even better, his departure opens up a small window table inside.

We order local beer—Sarajevska Pivi—from the jovial waiter and ask about food. The kitchen is closed, he says, but quickly adds that they could prepare something grilled.

"Ćevapčići?" I ask, hoping I am pronouncing the word correctly.

This brings the wide smile to his face. “Of course,” he replies.

We've been looking forward to this Balkan fast food since we read about it while researching our trip. The region's unofficial national dish, ćevapčići (or ćevapi?) is a seemingly simple plate of small fingers of ground meat grilled over charcoal and served spilling out of an open lepinja (pita) pocket with a mound of diced, raw onions.

The beer is cold, delicious, and cheap, and before I manage to drink even half of mine, the waiter returns with steaming plates of ćevapčići. The mildly spicy meat (usually a mixture of beef and lamb, sometimes pork) is delicious, the tangy onions a perfect complement to the smoky charcoal flavour. After another beer, I don't even notice the chilly air on the walk back to the hotel.

Sarajevo rests in a small, bowl-shaped valley bisected by the shallow Miljacka River. As we walk down the winding streets from our hotel the next day, the morning sunlight gives us our first glimpse of the mountains that embrace the city, houses with red-tiled roofs clinging precariously to their slopes. Charcoal smoke hovers like a beacon over the ćevapčići grills of Baščaršija, and we listen to a call to prayer emanating from one of the nearby minarets.

The bazaar is bustling. All the stalls are open, their wares spilling out into the narrow lanes. Most of the shops offer tourists one of two local specialties: hammered copper Turkish coffee sets decorated with Sarajevo skyline motifs, or silver filigree jewellery. Other shopping options include clothing, books, and—disturbingly—artillery shell casings hammered, shaped, and decorated to serve artistic or practical purposes.

This is the first evidence we encounter of the terrible conflict that engulfed Sarajevo in the 1990s, but it won't be the last. As we wander the streets, we see many buildings with façades that have clearly been repaired—the off-colour patches highlight the pattern of shrapnel damage. During the four-year siege here (April 1992 to February 1996), virtually every building in the city was damaged to some extent. About 35,000 buildings were completely destroyed. More staggering than the property damage is the fact that more than 12,000 Sarajevans died and another 50,000 were injured.

As we wander the city, however, it becomes apparent that Sarajevo has moved on. Memorials to the fallen are virtually nonexistent. We stroll along the river and stop at the Latin Bridge, the spot where the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, which led to World War One. Despite its place in history, this small bridge is unremarkable.

Similarly, the Sarajevo roses are nearly impossible to find. These sidewalk memorials to victims of the siege are supposed to be prolific near the Alipašina Mosque (whose tall minaret was an infamous Serbian sniper post), but it takes us a long time to locate even one. When we do, we are disappointed at first. The crimson resin poured into the scars left in the concrete by mortar explosions might have resembled blood originally, but has since faded to a colour not unlike that of the pavement. And there is no marker identifying the significance.

But as we head back into the old town it becomes clearer to us that this isn't about apathy or indifference. Sarajevans would rather put the past behind them and look forward with optimism. The Ferhadija walkway leading back into Baščaršija is the perfect example. It's lined with busy cafés, ice-cream shops, terrace bars, and boutiques, and we quickly dub it the Catwalk. Young couples stroll back and forth. Christian women wearing revealing fashions—and yes, high heels—brush by Muslim women covered head to toe, and neither bats an eye. This is Sarajevo's famous tolerance in action. The common denominator is youth, and the pervasive feeling is of leaving the past in the past.

Nowhere is that feeling stronger than at the brewery Sarajevska Pivara. Walking through the front doors of its pivnica (brewpub) that evening, my jaw drops. It's huge, a two-level main room with a vaulted brick ceiling and another large room on the side. We find one of the last remaining tables and laugh when we hear Bryan Adams singing about the past (“Summer of '69”) on the sound system.

The place looks old, at least a century, but the red-vested waiter takes our order on a PDA. I look around at the old wood, iron girders, and original wall murals, and when he returns with the house specialty—a delicious black beer that stands out next to the lagers served everywhere else—I ask him how old the place is.

“About two-and-a-half years,” he answers. “It used to be a garage or a hangar,” he continues. (A warehouse, I presume.) When I shake my head in disbelief, he smiles and says, “We have a very good architect.”

The waiters are kept busy as more and more well-dressed young people arrive. Again, the sense of forgetting the past is strong. The brewery was one of the city's only sources of fresh water during the siege, but now its brewpub is one of the most popular places to be on a Saturday night.

No one's thinking about that decade-old conflict here this Saturday night, so why should we? Instead, we raise our glasses and toast our decision to visit this wonderful, vital city. Welcome back, Sarajevo.