Ana Roš has, in the past year or so, become one of the most talked-about chefs in the culinary world. Being featured on Netflix’s spectacular Chef’s Table certainly helped, rocketing her and her restaurant Hiša Franko from a level of relatively local European fame to a truly global platform.
Shortly before meeting her at Nigel Haworth and Lisa Allen’s stunning Obsession 2017 – a seventeen day bacchanalian celebration of global cuisine tucked away in the lavish Northcote in Langho, Lancashire – she was given the oft-controversial title of the World’s Best Female Chef by The World's 50 Best.
This will, no doubt, propel the chef even further into the global limelight beyond those with a Netflix account. She was, undoubtedly, one of the most fascinating chefs of the series, due to the fact that she has not had a conventional cheffy path. She had to learn her craft on the job in the kitchens of Hiša Franko, relying on trial and error and gradually improving her skills. Her customers served as test subjects for her kitchen experiments during this time.
Aside from her unconventional past, the main thing that makes Ana Roš a truly exciting foodie figure is her approach to her environment. The Soca Valley in Slovenia, aside from being incredibly beautiful, is packed with tantalising ingredients and food traditions that are thoroughly plundered by Roš’s enquiring mind. From aging a local cheese that had never previously been aged, to reviving age-old practices of burying a beautiful variety of chicory that resembles deep-red roses under cow dung, there are few chefs in the world who draw so much from their surroundings, and prove so educational in teaching the world about her terroir.
I sat down with the chef to quiz her on experimentation, tradition and her mother-in-law's witchy practices.
What can we expect from the menu? Have you brought any Slovenian ingredients?
Yes, you can expect a very… my menu, so my expression of the Mediterranean and alpine world and the way that I live it. I didn’t bring many ingredients because I think it’s only right and correct that you know how to interpret and work with local ones – it’s also a challenge. I brought some things like the rosa di gorizia, a very particular chicory, because it has such a unique story. It grows for six months and needs a lot of work, fermenting twice underground and once in these sort of coffins covered in cow shit … so it’s a really good thing. These are little attentions I give to my territory to make sure that people speak about it.
Is this something you’ve created?
No, this chicory has existed here for more than 150 years. Just last week, my mother told me that three generations ago a part of her family was farming that chicory, and they actually made so much money with it that all the children in the house were able to go studying and became really important lawyers and stuff like that, so it’s really something we must never forget to mention.