This Tiny Central European Country Is a Food Lover's Dream

Dandelion roots and pea greens, truffles and wild mountain thyme — a meal in Slovenia is like a walk in a fairy-tale forest.

I had been in Slovenia just a few hours when, walking along a forest path outside the northwestern town of Kranjska Gora, my partner, Dave, and I saw two women huddled around a spruce tree, harvesting the soft green tips of the branches. I wondered what they would do with them. By the time it occurred to me to ask, we had continued on our hike, and when we turned around, the women were gone.

I might have forgotten about the spruce tips had it not been for our dinner that night. It was early evening when we arrived at Milka, a sleek, modern guesthouse on the edge of Lake Jasna. Built in the 1960s, Milka is one of Slovenia’s many gostiščes, family restaurants that speckle the country, offering overnight accommodations to dinner guests.

Seated on the deck, as the evening light channeled through the Julian Alps to the west, I drank a cocktail infused with dandelion root and black-currant wood and snacked on a buttery wafer topped with a compote of foraged barberries. When I asked Dino Katalenič, who was the general manager at the time, to explain a wild-asparagus canapé garnished with forget-me-not blossoms, he told me that every Tuesday, Milka’s younger chefs go out into the forests and fields to gather fresh ingredients. Dino — he had introduced himself as “Dino, short for ‘Dinosaur’” — was slim and debonair. A tattoo of a tiny airplane and its contrail spiraled his right wrist: a memento of his 16 years of travel before he returned home to help open Milka. When the sommelier brought us a bottle of Keltis Žan Belo, a skin-contact white wine from eastern Slovenia, the pairing was floral, unexpected, and perfectly precise.

In 2022, Milka earned its first Michelin star; the next year, it earned a second. Like many of the country’s best-known restaurants, it embodies a profound sense of kinship with the surrounding landscape. Over the nine days that Dave and I traversed Slovenia in search of its contemporary food culture — on a self-guided mission designed by the travel-planning firm Scott Dunn — we found ourselves in a feedback loop of earth and table. The nettles I spotted on Slemenova Špica, a rocky promontory we scrambled up one morning, for example, would reappear days later at Landerik, a stylish establishment in the capital, Ljubljana, their leaves topping a beef tartare.

“For a small country to distinguish itself, it has to tell a story,” Dino said. The narrative beginning to emerge is of a food culture defined by foraging and small-scale farming — practices so basic to the average local that to see them spawn a tourism industry is perhaps a shock. This is food that takes work: “It’s ingrained in our culture that you have to suffer a little bit,” he said.

When spruce tips appeared in our second course, in a tender nest of kohlrabi and caramelized cream, they tasted like a spring Christmas. I told Dino about the women we had seen, and he explained that Slovenians make a liqueur with the tips — smrekov liker — and suggested we try Milka’s version. Hours later, having forgotten his offer, we heard a knock at the door of our room. It was the sommelier, bearing a tray with two tiny glasses.

"Seated on the deck, as the evening light channeled through the Julian Alps to the west, I drank a cocktail infused with dandelion root and black-currant wood and snacked on a buttery wafer topped with a compote of foraged barberries."

The history of Slovenian cuisine is the history of a nation buffeted by almost every European influence — Celts, Romans, Alpine Slavs, Bavarians, the Napoleonic Empire, Italy, the Soviet bloc (Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia) — while, through it all, cultivating its own language and traditions. But the world didn’t take notice of Slovenian cuisine until recently.

In 2002, the self-taught chef Ana Ros took over the restaurant Hiša Franko from the family of her then-partner. Creating a menu from the products of the farms, rivers, and forests of the Soča Valley where she lives, Ros turned local food into a global attraction. In 2016, she was featured on the Netflix series Chef’s Table; four years later, when Michelin published its first Slovenian guide, Hiša Franko was awarded two stars, and in 2023, it earned a third.

Our reservations at the restaurant weren’t until the end of our trip, and yet we were already sensing Ros’s influence. One afternoon in Ljubljana, we dropped by her pop-up bistro in a quiet alley in the city center, where her daughter, Eva Klara, served us a platter of Hiša Franko’s famous roast beef. Earlier, at Open Kitchen, a food market across the river, we had passed a tent selling pastries from Pekarna Ana, Ros’s bakery. Every sunny Friday from March through October, some 50 of the best restaurants in Slovenia gather in Pogačarjev Square for the market, where they offer their most distinctive dishes. Since Open Kitchen began 11 years ago, it has become an incubator of sorts. Most of the restaurants in Slovenia with Michelin stars have had a tent there, including Ros’s.

“Ana Ros was over there,” the market’s director Lior Kochavy said, pointing, “and one Friday I get a phone call, ‘Sorry, we can’t make it. There’s an American TV crew here. Something Table.’ ” He laughed. The fact that Slovenian chefs have had to quit the market because of their own success thrills him.

We had arranged in advance to meet Kochavy at the Open Kitchen, but as soon as I found him, he vanished amid throngs of patrons. “I’ll bring you something,” he called. He reappeared and disappeared several more times in the next 20 minutes, delivering a basket of roast potatoes and pork with crispy rinds from Super Hrust, then veal liver, asparagus, and porcini from Gostilna Mihovec, and finally three different desserts, among them chocolate-dipped ice cream balls from Bon Bon Atelje.

Kochavy is not a chef, but when he moved to Ljubljana from Tel Aviv 15 years ago, he came to know Slovenia “through the stomach.” One day, he stopped at a family restaurant north of Ljubljana and ordered grilled mushrooms. They were so good he returned, but the dish wasn’t available anymore. “They looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What’s the matter with you, man? Mushroom is no longer in season.’ Whenever I spoke of this with locals, it was like, ‘This is how we cook here. This is normal.’ But this is not normal for most of the world.”

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Another distinguished Open Kitchen alumnus is Luka Košir, who worked in restaurants in Ljubljana before returning to the land he grew up on, a 30-minute drive west, and transforming his family’s traditional Slovenian restaurant into a Michelin-starred establishment, Grič. The morning after meeting Kochavy, that’s where we headed, on a narrow road that wound upward through forests and meadows, each one a constellation of wildflowers. It had been hard to wake up — for Dave especially, whose birthday I had naïvely announced to our Ljubljana guide, Jure Gašperšič, the night before. Gašperšič had taken us to TaBar, his favorite hangout, a hip tapas restaurant. Had a thunderstorm not struck the moment we tried to leave, we might have escaped the additional wine — and the hangover.

At Grič, Chef Košir and his sommelier, Nejc Farčnik, took pity on us when we arrived, offering espresso in lieu of sparkling wine. The dining room was lovely, with white vases sprouting wisps of grass on wooden tables hand-hewn by Košir and his father. The many other capabilities of the humble-mannered Košir soon become evident. When we finished our coffee, he led us up the mountain to his duck farm. In an old barn, he had arranged a spread of cured meat and mushrooms — foraged by his family and pickled by his mother — beside a portable oven he had engineered himself, in which he was baking a potato-and-cheese tart called frika.

At one point, Kosir left the barn to gather the garnish. We followed into a nearby field, watching as he whisked his hands through the grass and picked yarrow fronds, pea greens, and thyme blossoms. I learned from him that planting too many flowers in a garden entices butterflies, which lay eggs that hatch into caterpillars, which eat vegetables; that potatoes need wind to grow, so Košir buys his from a friend who grows them at a higher altitude; that, as winters warm with climate change, ducks put on less fat, so while he used to slaughter his in November, he now waits until the weather gets colder.

When we had finished our nine-course lunch — beeswax “butter,” fava beans, trout, duck (of course), fermented blueberry cream, all of it rich, homey, yet refined — Košir came to say goodbye. He was coated in spackle, having spent the afternoon on renovations. Soon guests will be able see into the kitchen and cellar, to witness how their food is preserved and prepared. “The future of gastronomy is in transparency,” he said.

For a small country, Slovenia has a surprising breadth of ecological diversity. There’s the Alpine region of the northwest, where Dave and I had begun our trip and, south of there, the fertile Vipava Valley, known for its wine and fruit. Farther south is the seaside and the northern part of the Istrian Peninsula, whose landscape is reminiscent of Tuscany. The day before we arrived in Ljubljana, we had visited the city of Maribor in the northeast, home of the oldest grape-bearing vine in Europe, where we rented bikes and pedaled near the Austrian border, over hills smelling of hay and roses.

Throughout our trip, we wanted to get as close as possible to the origins of our food, so one afternoon, in a pastoral valley near Lake Bled, Dave and I met Danijela and Blaž Ambrožič at Kravlov Med, their honey farm. Beekeeping is a revered tradition in Slovenia, and the enterprise is subsidized by the government. Danijela opened a window into a hive, where we watched as the queen deposited eggs into comb and worker bees fed and groomed her. “One bee is everything — builder, collector, guardian,” Danijela said.

There are 12,000 registered beekeepers in the country, the most per capita in the world. Not far from the Ambrožič farm is where Anton Janša, the father of modern apiculture, kept his hives in the 1770s, eventually becoming famous for his books on the subject. “We say, ‘No bees, no life,’ ” Danijela said. Even locals who don’t keep bees themselves seem to understand their fundamental role in the ecosystem. Some years ago, a young boy had been out gathering mushrooms in a nearby forest when he found a comb clinging to the outer bark of a tree. Being so exposed, he knew, the bees wouldn’t make it through the winter, so the boy told the Ambrožičs, who captured the swarm, cut the hive off the tree, and brought it home.

"In an old barn, he had arranged a spread of cured meat and mushrooms — foraged by his family and pickled by his mother — beside a portable oven he had engineered himself, in which he was baking a potato-and-cheese tart called frika.
"

Unlike beekeeping, truffle hunting is relatively new to Slovenia. Histories tend to credit the Sumerians with the beginnings of the practice. In Slovenia, it’s closer to 100 years old, yet a robust economy has sprung up around it, and one might easily assume the truffle has long been a vital element of the cuisine.

One day we drove two hours south to the Istrian Peninsula, where we spent a night at Residence Gold Istra, a modest gostišče perched on a ridgeline with sweeping views of the Dragonja Valley. A few years ago, a young family purchased the property and now offers truffle-hunting tours followed by seven-course meals in their tasting room.

Our guide was a friend of the family: Jakob Benčič, who was taught how to hunt truffles by his father. Benčič is also a second-generation police officer, and despite having spent the previous night responding to noise complaints, he appeared fresh, his beard closely clipped. He had brought with him an adorably eager border collie named Jano, the son of the best truffle-hunting dog the Benčičs have ever owned.

Jano has a good nose but is “hyper,” Benčič said, and has yet to live up to his mother’s reputation. We chased the dog down the hill from the residence into a low-canopied forest, and within a few minutes, he was pawing at the ground near the base of an oak. Benčič scraped the soil with a trowel, gently so as not to puncture the truffle. When it emerged, it looked like a cross between a potato and a rock, heavy when Benčič dropped it into my palm.

Truffle graced the menu of almost every restaurant we ate at in Slovenia, even when we least expected it. The next afternoon, in the shimmery seaside city of Piran, Dave and I glanced at a map we’d been carrying since the start of our trip, on which the Milka staff had pinned their favorite restaurants. There was only one in Piran — Rostelin — and we expected it to offer seafood, but when we arrived at the café on the sleepy square, we found mostly pasta and meat.

“Ten times a day people come in asking for calamari, but you can’t get squid from the sea here,” our lanky chef, Darjan Murovec, said, waving toward the Adriatic. He’d grown up in an apartment across the square and, after a sojourn in Germany, had returned a few years earlier to open the restaurant. He wanted to serve food that was Istrian, and nothing was more Istrian than pasta, he said. We ordered the gnocchi and a local variety called fuži, topped with truffle shavings.

It felt good to circle back to the Julian Alps, where we had begun, though by then we had reached the south of the range, where the turquoise Soča River spills from limestone crags into the fertile Soča Valley. We’d woken that morning to a deluge of rain, but it was our last day in Slovenia, so we decided to take a circuitous road into the mountains and were rewarded with sunbeams cracking through clouds, sweeping across the sharp ridges. We hiked several miles, past nettles and wild thyme, and, on the other side of a ridge, spotted the storybook town of Drežnica. Seeing the town from above, I felt strangely satiated, having mapped the food I ate onto its landscape. Then we descended back into the valley, the day suddenly sunny, and made our way through the village of Kobarid to Hiša Franko.

In a 2017 interview, Ana Ros noted the effort it takes for a developing country like Slovenia to gain culinary recognition. “Everybody travels for food to Copenhagen, London, or Paris, but who knows where Kobarid is?” she said.

From the outside, Hiša Franko is unassuming, tucked against the mountains, the grounds a riot of flowers and herbs. Our host, Dejan Vukašinović, led us to our cozy room on the top floor, apologizing that Ros would not be there to greet us, as she was cooking in Tasmania. We read books on our sunny deck until it was time for the aperitif, and a waiter led us to a small table beside a creek lined with dandelions, where I sipped a soft, delicate martini made with olive oil. Finally, it was time: we entered an airy dining room, where the perfectly choreographed staff presented us each with a pincushion of moss to wipe our hands on, then delivered the first dish: white asparagus on a button of smoky cream cheese, topped with a walnut that had been soaked in water and was as tender as if it had just been plucked from a tree.

I had chosen the “funky” drink pairing, which promised an adventure in fermentation. As I tried Feo Amfora, a beer that had been fermented in wooden barrels and then refermented with grape must, I looked around. The restaurant was full of couples from other countries. Its reputation had put it on the world map, and yet the ground its menu covered was, as ever, local: a corn beignet, fluffy like a doughnut, pocketed with trout roe and chive. A nest of asparagus and white strawberry on a salty yeast cream — the only salad for which I’ve ever been given a spoon. A potato baked into a hay crust, to be cracked open like an egg. A tiny nest of tagliolini, crunchy with cacao nibs and truffle shavings. A wild-mushroom and forest-moss broth meant to evoke a rainy walk in the woods. This was food with contradictions: New and old, strange and familiar. It wasn’t my home, but it tasted like home.

Where to Stay and Eat

Gold Istra Residence

Reasons for staying at this eight-room gostišče on the Istrian Peninsula include the view of the Dragonja Valley, with its olive trees, and the truffle-hunting tours.

Gricˇ

In the town of Šentjošt nad Horjulom, a half-hour’s drive from the capital, this farm-to-table experience has two tasting-menu options, which chef Luka Košir changes often. Overnight accommodations are coming soon.

Hiša Denk

Close to the city of Maribor, near the Austrian border, this once-traditional family establishment has been recast as a modern, Michelin-starred ode to fine dining; it also has six guest rooms.

Hiša Franko

The only restaurant in the country to earn three Michelin stars provides a sensory overload of flavor and color that’s refined, yet welcoming. Reserve a night in one of the 10 cozy rooms to use as a base for touring the Soča Valley.

Landerik

While everything is good, the star of the show at this Ljubljana restaurant is the šmorn, a dessert made of caramelized chunks of bread topped with vanilla yogurt and apricot jam.

Milka

Perhaps the most picturesque guesthouse in all of Slovenia, set on the edge of the emerald Lake Jasna. Eat breakfast on the deck as the sun rises over the Julian Alps.

Open Kitchen

The options at this Friday food festival in Ljubljana are endless and dependably delicious. Highlights include the pork with crispy rinds at the Super Hrust stall and the pastries from Pekarna Ana, Ana Ros’s bakery.

Rostelin

Possibly the best (and always house-made) pasta in Slovenia is served at this restaurant, on a quiet square in the coastal city of Piran.

TaBar

A hip tapas spot in the center of Ljubljana that offers dishes like crisp fried elderflower and king oyster mushrooms with dehydrated blueberry cream.

Zlata Ladjica Hotel

In Ljubljana’s Old Town, guests at this 15-room modern hotel in a 17th-century building can watch rowers glide by on the river below. It’s also an easy walk to the city’s best restaurants.

How to Book

Scott Dunn

A team of specialists at this high-end agency can create custom trips throughout Slovenia, working with a network of local contacts to arrange truffle foraging, cooking classes, beekeeping lessons, wine tastings — and secure even the most elusive dinner reservations.

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