Hiša Franko

Ana Roš did not set out to be a chef. She came to Hiša Franko through Valter Kramar, whose family had run the place, and for a while she worked the floor while someone else held the kitchen. In 2002 the head chef left, and she took the stove with no formal training behind her, learning from a mother-in-law, from a family friend, and then from her own reading and her own travelling. The house is older than any of that. It goes back to 1861, at Staro selo just outside Kobarid, where the Soča runs an improbable green between wooded slopes.

The ten rooms came for one honest reason. After a menu that runs to three hours and a valley gone black outside, no one should be on the road. They are plain in the right way: contemporary, a few good pieces, a private bathroom, almost nothing switched on. The window does the decorating. You take a night, and it is enough.

One tasting menu, no choice, lunch and dinner from Wednesday to Sunday, about three hours from first plate to last. The kitchen runs on the ground it stands on. Foragers, shepherds, cheesemakers, hunters and fishermen bring what the season gives: trout from the Soča, deer and goat off the high pastures, forest fruit, wild plants gathered that morning. A cellar under the house ages Tolminc and other local cheese, and the wine list is deep and largely regional. Roš cooks all of it in a way she has called almost scientific, precise with temperature and texture, unafraid of raw vegetables and of a flavour that arrives without an apology.

The wider world found her early. Netflix put her on Chef's Table in 2016, and her book, Sun and Rain, came out on Phaidon in 2020. Both read the same way the meal does, as a long and stubborn argument for this one corner of Slovenia rather than for a style that could travel. That is the gamble of a single valley-bound menu. It is also the reason to make the drive.

The accolades caught up with the cooking. Roš was named the world's best female chef in 2017. In 2023 Hiša Franko took three Michelin stars, the first restaurant in Slovenia to hold them, and has kept them since, alongside a Green Star for the way it sources. She is one of only a handful of women anywhere to reach three stars, and among a smaller group still who hold three stars and a green one together. None of it reads as a marketing line when you look at where the food comes from: a valley walked, fished and foraged rather than ordered in.

Guide places move, and it is only fair to say so. The World's 50 Best list, which the restaurant sat inside from 2017, ranked it thirty-second in 2023, forty-eighth in 2024, then sixty-ninth in 2025, out of the top fifty for the first time in years. Make of that what you will. Lists are a weather system, and the stars have not budged. What has not moved at all is the setting: the same green river, the same short season of open windows, the same ten rooms above a kitchen most people plan a journey around.