Former Yugoslavia finally has a three-star Michelin restaurant! In the small Slovenian town of Kobarid, in the Julian Alps, Ana Roš has been running Hiša Franko since 2002, transforming it from a traditional inn into a gourmet restaurant.
Roš is yet another example of a self-taught chef who made a drastic career change after an unexpected turn of events. Once a skier on the Yugoslavian youth national team, she then studied diplomacy in Gorizia, where she met her ex-partner, Valter Kramar. When Kramar decided to take over his parents’ restaurant, Hiša Franko, he became the sommelier while Roš ran the front of the house. The then-chef wasn’t too keen on experimenting, so Roš quickly learned to cook and took over the kitchen, soon attracting regional attention with her culinary creations. A few years into running the business, Roš and Kramar visited some of Europe’s best restaurants for inspiration, and this helped turn the menu at Hiša Franko into something more distinctive. In the 2010s, Roš’s reputation started to grow beyond the Slovenian borders, and eventually she was featured in the 2016 Netflix documentary Chef’s Table, and named best female chef by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, single-handedly putting Slovenia on the proverbial culinary map. When the Michelin Guide released its first edition in the country in 2020, Hiša Franko was awarded two Michelin stars. In 2023, the restaurant received its third macaron, becoming one of Europe’s easternmost establishments to receive this distinction (further east you’ll find only 2 more, in Vienna).
Hiša Franko is nestled in the Soča Valley, an area praised by nature lovers, close to the border with Italy and not far from Austria too. With barely a thousand inhabitants, the village of Kobarid is the kind of place where most amenities come in singles: one stadium, one school, one museum, one hotel – only the temples of religion and consumerism, the churches and supermarkets, have been duplicated. The restaurant occupies a large property in Staro Selo (literally “old village”), a hamlet of a few dozen houses crossed by a handful of streets that all bear the same name.
I had the chance to try Hiša Franko’s spring menu a few months before the team earned their third star. The chef clearly displayed her ambitions through an eclectic succession of seventeen dishes, sometimes far from regional cuisine with Asian notes and modernist ingredient combinations (venison-beetroot-oyster-kiwi, for example), sometimes more local with polenta, horseradish, trout, and game, sometimes playing on the proximity of Italy with two plates of pasta and a barley risotto. The dishes consistently gave pride of place to flowers, herbs, and fruits, and apart from black truffle – from nearby Istria – there were none of the ingredients typically dear to the Michelin guide. To go with the food, guests choose between alcoholic pairings labeled as classic (“a more classical taste of the wine world,” with a focus on Slovenia) and funky (“the most interesting artisan producers, as well as wild and brave biodynamic and natural wines,” plus “a cocktail at some point,” “to experiment out of your comfort zone”), or a nonalcoholic pairings of house-made juices, kombuchas, and lacto-fermented tonics. Needless to say, I went with the funky alcoholic option. To the table!
What’s a fine-dining meal without a glass of champagne? To pair with our first three courses, the Triptyque Brut Nature, a Premier Cru from Timothée Stroebel, is assembled from three different varietals (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier) coming from three different types of soils (sand, chalk, and clay) and blended from three different vintages (2014, 2016, and 2017), “in a warm and welcoming style.”
First course: white asparagus sandwiched between magnolia petals and a walnut half (peeled to remove the bitter edge) with a zemljanka dip. The latter is made of an emulsion of smoked egg yolk and Tolminc cheese, a semi-hard cow’s milk cheese produced in the region and known as the “King of Mountain Heaven,” that is partially matured by being buried in a pit. We’re told how to properly eat the dish: dip the asparagus in the cheese and finish with the walnut. The flavors go well together, though one might wonder what’s wrong with unpeeled walnuts being bitter or whether it’s really worth burying cheese in the ground.
Next, two mini seed tacos are filled with black sunchoke purée, pear, and chickpeas, and topped with silene vulgaris leaves (an ingredient found in Italy and in the Spanish region of La Mancha) and sunchoke flowers. I would be hard-pressed to identify all the ingredients, but the sweet and slightly vegetal taco is quite pleasant.
Now comes one of the pretties mussels ever served. A single shell is filled with a crumble made from bread and parsley, a salad of celery, fennel, sea beans, green peas, and nori, and a nice plump mussel. The dish is finished tableside with a broth made of mussel, clam stock, lacto-fermented tomato water, kombu, and a little bit of chili. The tangy broth perfectly balances the briny seafood flavor and the vegetal medley, making this the first truly remarkable dish of the evening.
As “a funky pairing is never complete without a cocktail,” we’re being poured a gin infused with sunchoke and combined with amazake (a Japanese fermented drink normally made from rice but hereby from barley and buckwheat) and bergamot for a touch of acidity. A very good cocktail indeed. Sunchoke is a very common root vegetable in Slovenia, hence its second appearance on the menu. This will be our beverage for the next two courses, two Hiša Franko classics…
The corn beignet takes inspiration from a Carniolan dish of polenta and pork crackling. Here, the polenta is deep-fried, and the super-airy fritter is filled with creamy fermented cottage cheese, smoked trout roe, and wild chives. The grains on top are also polenta. From the light texture to the appearance, this dish reminds me of a dessert, only savory rather than sweet.
The second classic consists of a potato baked in a summer hay crust, served with cultured horseradish-lovage butter and a forest consommé made with moss, mushrooms, and pine oil. It, too, comes with instructions: “with your hands you will simply break the crust,” “you will put butter on the potato, and then when you finish, you will take a sip of forest broth,” “the smell should remind you of a rainy day in the forest.” Okay, we all know that baked potato goes well with butter. The consommé boasts a pleasant mushroom flavor, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some soy sauce in there too.
Our third glass takes us to hardcore biodynamic winemaking territory. The 2020 Šuman Sun Drops wine hails from Styria, near the border with Austria and Hungary. Radovan Šuman blends three different varietals that are strong in flavors: Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and Traminer. This Demeter-certified wine is skin-macerated for almost one month, aged in neutral wooden barrels, and poured into easily recognizable clay bottles. The result is quite intense, with a lot of tannins on the palate, and will be paired with two spring-inspired dishes.
In a small bowl, what must be one of the year’s first strawberries is compressed with kaffir lime, and finished with fava beans and a sauce of bay leaf milk and cheese. Unfortunately, as much as I appreciate tasting the produce of the budding season, the strawberry tastes more acidic than sweet (probably because of the lime), and I’m not much reminded of spring.
But the next dish, “spring feast,” corrects direction. A salad of wild asparagus mixes different calibers of the speary green, from pencil-thin to finger-thick, with slices, shavings, and tips, cooked al dente, hiding a morel mushroom and a sauce of roasted yeast cream and watercress. The asparagus is really excellent, the sauce boasts a vegetable flavor and the yeast adds an almost cheesy note. A very successful dish, centered around one ingredient, and quite fresh.
Our fourth pairing, the 2010 Oxy from Nando in Dobrovo, in the Goriška Brda region (near the Italian border) is a very special wine that vintner Andrej Kristančič made mostly as an experiment. In 2010, he harvested his Jakot (Slovenia’s tongue-in-cheek backslang for Tocai Friulano, following the decision by the European Court of Justice that only Hungarian wines could use the name Tokaji or its homophones) and bottled 80% of the wine after two years of aging, keeping only one barrel “to see what would happen.” And he kept that barrel for another 8 years – quite a long aging for a white varietal. The nose reveals a lot of caramel and notes of dried fruits, and the wine developed a slightly oxidized character (hence the name Oxy!) but in a good way, which I’ve noticed isn’t uncommon for older skin-macerated wines in the region. This will be our beverage for the coming pasta and risotto dishes.
The hand-cut tagliolini (a kind of thin tagliatelle) are cooked with carrots, mixed with a mountain rabbit stew (its cooking juices reduced), and finished with cocoa nibs and some of the season’s first fresh black summer truffles from Istria (surprisingly flavorful). The dish also brings an Asian flair in the way it’s prepared, via the ramen-like quality of the pasta. Well executed, with more robust flavors than the previous courses.
Time for a surprise dish: a barley risotto with wild asparagus and an egg yolk emulsion, topped with ground cinnamon and hazelnut. Slovenia doesn’t grow rice, we are told, hence the substitution. The barley is cooked al dente just the same, the egg yolk adds the perfect texture, and I think I taste some mushroom in the sauce.
Our next wine takes us far from Slovenia, to Castile and León, in Spain. The 2019 Michika from Esmeralda García is made with the Verdejo varietal in a reductive style, using pretty much the same type of vinification as in Andalusia’s sherry region. The nose supposedly boasts a lot of green apple and lemon zest and a bit of gun powder, and the taste an intense acidity. Personally, I only find a boring white wine that’s absolutely not my thing, and I’m wondering what it’s doing in this pairing.
Luckily, the trout dish that’s landing on our table makes up for it. The two-day dry-aged trout (from the famous Lake Bohinj, of course) is cooked on a shichirin grill and served with a brown butter fish sauce, trout roe, pickled celery root, and horseradish. The red trout are kept in a small pool at the back of the property until they meet their fate. The fish is cooked to perfection, its flesh spoon-tender and its skin crispy, the amount of horseradish just right to spice up the sauce. One of my favorite dishes so far!
And then we’re back to the Slovenian biodynamic wine movement, with the infamous Organic Anarchy from Styria! Before we even talk about what’s in the glasses, we get a lecture on the vessels themselves. Winemaker Aci Urbajs makes his own, in accordance with the principles of Rudolf Steiner, and serves everything in them: vine leaf tea, white wine, red wine. We’re getting a pour of the latter, a 2021 Blaufränkisch. In fact, I don’t think the sommelier says much about it, and this is a wine to drink more for the platonic ideal of biodynamics than for its intrinsic quality: it’s a little bit acidic, it doesn’t have a lot of body or bouquet…
But it does go well with the next dish.
The deer heart, served with an emulsion of kiwi and oysters on a kale leaf, dressed with a Gamay jus, and garnished with beets that were dehydrated and rehydrated (to alter their texture), is an homage to chef Roš’s father, who used to hunt. Unbeknownst to many, kiwis are quite common in Slovenia and its neighbors. There are kiwi trees in the restaurant’s parking lot. This baroque paring is by far the most daring of the entire menu. Venison and beets, sure, but kiwi? Yet the fruit brings a welcome touch of acidity and freshness. The heart is delicious and very tender, the beet very well executed, but the oyster a bit too discrete. For some obscure reason, this dish, like most if not all of its predecessors, is served without a knife. Try to cut a kale leaf with a spoon…
Then comes the UFO of the tasting, a fermented lentil dosa with kid goat (“from a small village 25 minutes from us, really famous in Slovenia for its goats”), salty yogurt (“from a family located in a small village near Lubljana”), curry leaf powder, and wild watercress (“from our garden”). We’re instructed to dip the dosa into the yogurt and eat it with our hands, before using a finger rinse complete with pebbles, plants, and smoke, meant to evoke the morning fog in the valley. I love Indian food, but, even with the local ingredients, what is this dish doing here? The dosa is great, the yogurt is a classic pairing, but the spices mask the taste of the goat meat. And can I have a knife, at long last?
We conclude the savory part of the menu with some comfort food, the “pasta Ana.” This is a dish that the chef’s mother used to make for her, and that she often prepares for the kitchen staff to cheer them up: a ravioli filled with well-seasoned fermented ricotta and tomatoes (coming from Istria, where Roš spent a lot of time as a kid), with a very concentrated tomato foam and a little bit of brown butter. Simple but excellent. Being once again denied any cutlery, we decide to ask: “Do you have knives at Hiša Franko???” “We have them, but we’re not using them. To us, they’re not necessary, and we do not want to push something that is not necessary.” As if luxury in general and Michelin restaurants in particular are ever about necessity…
Our palate cleanser is a tangerine and rose granita, with pine oil, coffee oil, and almond milk infused with lovage. The dish fulfills its role to a T.
Our first dessert is called “I love bees” (“because we wanted to dedicate a dish to these small, really hard working creatures”). It consists of brioche baked with honey and filled with a fondue of beeswax and zemljanka (the same cheese that appeared in our first course), garnished with hazelnuts and a couple different apple preparations. A chamomile tea acts as our beverage pairing. The brioche feels more like a dumpling to me, and I was expecting more sweetness from the honey to balance the tartness of the apple.
It’s been a while since we were last poured a glass of wine! Our last desserts will be washed down with another Blaufrankisch from Styria, though it couldn’t be more different from Organic Anarchy’s. The Mea Blaufrankisch Pet Nat from Matic Wines screams pink grapefruit to me, both with its color and its aroma (where I detect other citrus fruits too). Winemaker Matija Žerjav (a.k.a Matic) is one of the rising stars of Slovenian natural wine. A great discovery.
Next comes a plum cooked in amazake, a sweet, low-alcohol Japanese drink normally from fermented rice, but here homemade using barley. The fruit rests on some bay leaf panna cotta and crumble made from oatmeal and kōji cookies. Though somehow reminiscent of a toddler’s spoon-fed breakfast, the result is rich in textures and surprising flavors.
Our last course consists of a pear compressed with cognac and vanilla, topped with caramel, pastry cream, and some herbs. This is a strange choice for several reasons… 1) it was kept from the previous fall, since spring isn’t exactly pear season, for no other apparent purpose than to demonstrate the chef’s culinary prowess. 2) we’re not given any utensils and are supposed to eat it with our hands. 3) I’ve eaten pears that were much fruitier than this.
Before we call it a wrap, we receive a buckwheat and cottage cheese caramel to take home. My dining partners’ obvious interest in the NSK artworks hanging on the walls attracts the sympathy of Ana Roš, who takes us on a tour of the kitchens and offers us a digestif – a lovely gesture; not that we really needed a drink after the many bottles the three of us downed over dinner and in the two wine tastings that preceded our meal!
To recap, we ate some truly excellent things (the mussel, the corn beignet, the spring feast, the trout), but others disappointed (the potato, the strawberry, the dosa, the pear). This 17-course menu conceals a fantastic 10-course tasting that would be much more memorable without the other 7. The very small portions, albeit necessary in such a long procession of plates, become tiring, and I found myself longing for one larger dish.
I don’t claim to know all the Michelin superstars of the world, far from it, but tastings with over 10 dishes are actually quite rare – with the exception of omakase, whose culinary style is extremely focused, and some high-end Spanish restaurants, where this represents a sort of evolution of tapas culture. One could argue that another objective of long menus is to highlight seasonal ingredients. Spring can be an exciting time, but it’s also an in-between season where many ingredients are either fading out or still weeks away from becoming available. Can Slovenia in the spring really claim the same variety as Spain?
Yet another motivation could be storytelling through food. However, I feel like the narrative arc of Hiša Franko’s menu is fragmented. There’s no real progression throughout the meal, and the dishes could be shuffled (desserts included) without any major dissonance. Local products abounded, but didn’t always express the region’s terroir, the recipes sometimes taking supernumerary and/or superfluous sharp turns to Southeast and East Asia. If this all sounds pedantic, well, when you go to a pretentious restaurant, you’re entitled to give pretentious opinions!
Then there’s the cutlery issue…
Still, I could totally see myself going back to Hiša Franko, if only to see how the third star has changed the restaurant. As it turns out, this might very well happen in a few months, during my next potential trip to Slovenia…
