I'd driven the hire car from Tivat Airport with the sort of overconfidence that only comes from watching someone else do it on YouTube the night before. The coastal road to Dobrota unravelled like a dropped string of pearls, each bay more ridiculous than the last, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself until I realised I'd been following the sat nav to a fish restaurant rather than my actual accommodation. Forty minutes of increasingly narrow lanes later, I reversed into a wall of stacked lobster pots outside someone's garden shed and had to knock on their door for directions. The grandmother who answered spoke no English but communicated through the universal language of tutting and pointing, and I eventually found the stone house tucked between two others, its green shutters faded to the colour of old sea glass.

The key was under a terracotta pot, which I only discovered after trying three others and briefly considering whether I was about to commit a minor burglary. Inside, the kitchen smelled of rosemary and the previous guest's olive oil, and I immediately abandoned my plans to eat out that first evening in favour of attempting something with the tomatoes I'd spotted at a roadside stall. This proved optimistic. The hob had two settings, I later learned: "barely warm" and "surface of the sun." My intended simple pasta became a sort of caramelised tomato cement, and I ate it on the small terrace with a glass of supermarket Vranac, watching the bay darken and pretending to myself that charred garlic was an intentional flourish.

Dobrota, I discovered over the following days, is essentially a string of stone houses and waterfront restaurants stretched along Kotor Bay like someone has emptied a pocketful of gems. The local konobas became my education. I found one on the second evening, drawn by the smell of grilled fish and the sound of a radio playing something accordion-heavy. The owner, a man with hands like shovels and a moustache that deserved its own postcode, explained the menu by pointing at things and making expressive noises. I ate black risotto, which stains your teeth in a way that makes you look like you've been chewing coal, and drank local Krsko beer that tasted of the mountains behind us. He refused my attempt at ordering in phrasebook Montenegrin, correcting my pronunciation with the patience of someone who has heard many foreigners mangle his language.

The market in Kotor's old town became my morning ritual, though "market" suggests more organisation than the jumble of tables outside the city walls actually possesses. I bought figs that split open like they were too full of their own sweetness, and cheese from a woman who wrapped it in paper with the efficiency of someone who has done this ten thousand times. My cooking improved marginally. I learned that the hob's "surface of the sun" setting was perfect for blistering peppers, and that the small shop near the property sold dried prsut ham that made any meal feel deliberate rather than desperate.

I attempted to recreate a fish soup I'd eaten at a waterfront place called something unpronounceable beginning with B. The owner had described it as "grandmother's recipe," which I now suspect is local code for "whatever was caught this morning." Mine tasted primarily of my own optimism and too much paprika. I ate it anyway, on the same terrace, with more Vranac and the sound of someone else's dinner party drifting from three houses down.

The pubs, if you can call them that, were really just restaurants that stayed open later. I found one that served grilled sardines with nothing but lemon and bread, and I ate there three times in one week because the owner remembered my name and because the bay at that hour turns a colour that makes you want to stay forever. Another evening, I attempted to buy fresh squid from a boat that had just come in, but the fisherman and I reached an impasse regarding both price and whether I actually knew how to clean the things. I retreated with my dignity and a bag of mussels instead, which I steamed with the last of my market garlic and some wine I suspected was better than my cooking deserved.

By my final morning, I had accumulated a small collection of half-used spices, a jar of local honey with a label I couldn't read, and the certain knowledge that I would never master that hob. I left the remaining olive oil and a note of apology for the next guest, whoever they might be, and walked down to the water one last time for coffee that tasted of the wood fire it was made over. The grandmother whose lobster pots I'd disturbed walked past with her dog, nodded at me with what I chose to interpret as forgiveness, and I sat there until the light changed and it was time to drive back to the airport, this time with no sat nav at all.