When Ana Ros became head chef at Hisa Franko, a restaurant in the Slovenian countryside, she had never attended culinary school, nor had she ever dreamed of being a chef. In college, her friends would “run away” when it was her turn to prepare food because they didn’t like her food, she recalled.
Twenty years later, she is now a celebrity chef, earning her restaurant international acclaim and putting Slovenia on the map as a popular foodie destination.
When she accepted the job, in 2002, Ros was 30 years old and pregnant.. His partner at the time, Valter Kramar, had inherited his parents’ modest restaurant. “I went into the little kitchen, closed the door, leaned against the wall and thought, ‘Ana, what did you just do?’” Ros said.
Today, Hisa Franko employs 45 people and has two Michelin stars and a place as one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in an annual list by William Reed, a British media firm.
Ros is known for using local ingredients — trout from the Soca River, cheese aged in a cellar, and mushrooms from the forest. Everything is seasonal.
Last year, he opened Pekarna Ana, a bakery in the capital Ljubljana, and in February, he opened a temporary bistro there called Ana in Slon.
“How do you go from someone who isn’t a cook to someone who is defining your national cuisine?” asked Brian McGinn, an executive producer of “Chef’s Table,” a Netflix series. The show included Ros in 2016.
In the early years, Ros researched ingredients and cooking techniques, attended culinary conferences, and experimented with recipes.
Over time, he helped popularize Slovenian cuisine. She was invited to events with well-known colleagues such as chefs René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen and Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in New York.
However, when Netflix invited her to appear on “Chef’s Table”, few diners turned up on weekdays or in the winter, and Hisa Franko was not yet known outside of Slovenia.
The episode was then broadcast. In the span of a few days, Hisa Franko sold out the reservations for the entire year.
The sudden influx of diners, along with fame, overwhelmed her. “I collapsed,” Ros noted. “I needed to completely reset the way I was working.”
Ros lives in the Soca Valley, where seasonal tourism drives restaurant activity. He said that before “Chef’s Table,” diners tended to expect dishes like pizza and schnitzel. “Instead, we had coffee pasta with trout,” Ros said. When he started experimenting with unconventional dishes, many guests left as soon as they saw the menu, he revealed.
However, over time, the unexpected combinations were what earned him recognition.
By: VALERIYA SAFRONOVA
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6779731, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-27 21:40:08
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