Dinner cooked by the World’s Best Female Chef: Hiša Franko, Slovenia
I had been excited about this meal for months. There were a lot of things to be excited about. Ana Roš, the chef, was named the Best Female Chef in the world in 2017 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. She received that award in Melbourne earlier this year. Hiša Franko, the restaurant, is number 69 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Top 100 List (no, I’m not sure how that works either – best female chef in the world, but her restaurant is not in the Top 50?). Despite these accolades, it does not have a Michelin star. Why? Because the Michelin Guide does not cover Slovenia. It also does not cover Australia! Ana is a self-taught chef. She started cooking when she and her husband, Valter who is also the sommelier at Hiša Franko, took over his family’s business. Ana was on track to be a diplomat when this happened; it caused a rift in her own family that lasted years. After long years of struggle, they started to gain a reputation for quality food among the European tourists that visited the Soča Valley. It was the appearance of the restaurant on the Netflix show, The Chef’s Table that took her restaurant to the world stage. I guess she was an overnight success, twenty years in the making, in a restaurant that has existed since 1868.
If you haven’t seen The Chef’s Table, it should be compulsory viewing for anyone interested in food. It tells the stories of various chefs around the world and depicts the food, the people and the landscapes and cities they inhabit in this lush, panoramic style that makes you want to visit every single place and eat every single meal and meet every single chef. The Soča Valley doesn’t need any help to look more beautiful, but they did it anyway!
I booked a table at Hiša Franko for dinner whilst I was sitting at Mum and Dad’s kitchen bench in early July, about 3 months before I would dine there. I hadn’t seen The Chef’s Table episode, it was via a post on the World’s 50 Best Instagram account that I heard of the restaurant. Mum had just decided she might come and see me for a couple of weeks. Once the booking was made, her trip really got planned around that dinner, which was on the first night she arrived in Slovenia!
Hiša Franko is in Kobarid, about 2 hours drive from Ljubljana and around an hour from Udine, the nearest large Italian town. It’s not somewhere you drive through. If you are in Kobarid, it’s on purpose. And now people travel from all over the world, specifically to eat at Hiša Franko. More on Kobarid and the Soča Valley soon, because it’s not somewhere you should rush through just for one dinner, even if the dinner is this good!
It was surprising how informal it was. The room felt more like a very tastefully decorated living room, than a fancy restaurant. Bright coloured walls with art everywhere and lamp lighting and big floral decorations. It was warm and welcoming and noisy. This was not a hushed tones, sparse, Scandinavian vibe. The front of house staff were also charmingly informal – they wore black T-shirts under their aprons and runners. They were informed, friendly and happy to have some banter. It was lovely to have Mum as a dining companion, but I knew I would have been very comfortable there as a solo diner also.
We opted for the 11 courses with matched wines, all Slovenian. The full shebang. Well I did and poor Mum didn’t have much choice! I had nowhere I needed to be the next day and I was determined to have the full Hiša Franko experience.
We started with some little fried cheese lollipops served with a delicious dry, pink sparkling and then some appetizers. The Linden leaf with fermented beet, cottage cheese and forest honey that somehow tasted like peanut butter was my pick of them all. The house bread made with fermented apple peel and served with whipped butter was dangerously good – the sort of warm, moorish bread it’s very difficult to stop eating even when you know you have 11 courses ahead.
One of the things I love most about degustation menus, is that I will eat things I would never be brave enough to order a la carte. We had sweetbreads, beef tongue, tripe, chanterelles (yes, I know mushrooms are hardly pushing the boundaries but I am not a mushie fan!). And with each dish we marveled over the complexity and the creativity and the fact we apparently liked eating offal. There was some Japanese influence and Italian and even Mexican in the rabbit served with mole.
My favourites were the trout (a specific type of trout from the Soča Valley) and the peach and watermelon dessert that was so fresh and different.
By the end of the 11 courses and matched wines we were very happy, full, but not uncomfortably so, and slightly tipsy! This experience was not just about the food (as fantastic as it was). It was about knowing a bit about Ana and Valter’s story and feeling like, just for a moment, you got to be a little part of it. Being somewhere so remote and beautiful, in a tiny country that is not that long out of communist times and is still not on a lot of people’s radars when it comes to European travel. Eating in a home that is said to have been where Ernest Hemingway recuperated after being hurt on the front and wrote Farewell to the Arms. And of course, sharing the meal with my Mum on her first night of our travels. I imagine we’ll be boring the rest of the family with that for some time to come!
Just to cap it off, as we were leaving, Ana come out to the front door. Not specifically to greet us, as sometimes happens in nice restaurants, we were just lucky to be there at the same time I think! We talked about Melbourne and her travels (she had just returned from Japan) and thanked her for a wonderful experience. And, thanks to the tipsiness, were cheeky enough to ask for a slightly blurry selfie with the Best Female Chef in the World!
Photo credit for feature image: Worlds 50 Best Restaurants