Chef finds recipe for success in kitchen and in life
Ana Roš started cooking relatively late. “I was 30 years old and pregnant with my first child,” she says. Which makes it all the more improbable that the self-taught Slovenian would come to land the title of The World’s Best Female Chef.
But after a decade of what she describes as “struggling with pans and knives, days and days of throwing things away, trying every single day to understand more,” the accolade is hers.
It was not exactly written in the stars: Her father was a doctor and her mother a journalist from a family of diplomats. Roš, who speaks five languages, was studying to become a diplomat herself, until the day she swerved in a different direction.
After she met her husband, Valter Kramar, a Slovenian wine specialist and collector, the couple decided to take over his parents’ restaurant, Hiša Franko — in Slovenia’s remote Soča Valley — and resolved, before long, to shake things up.
“(We) were at a crossroads,” she says. “By this stage, Valter and I had been travelling and eating out all over the world, to El Bulli, Le Calandre, Osteria Francescana, El Celler de Can Roca . ... We thought nothing of driving 500 kilometres or flying an hour and a half just for dinner. We could see that food was evolving, but our kitchen team wasn’t ambitious enough to realize our new philosophy at Hiša Franko. There was a moment we looked at each other and said: ‘OK, one of us needs to take over the kitchen.’ After a short discussion, I agreed. So one bright day, I entered the kitchen ...”
As a mother of two, Roš, now 44, knows all about the struggles female chefs face in balancing the pressures of the kitchen with home life.
“My American sous chef, one of the greatest chefs I’ve ever seen in my life, she’s 27 (and) she told me that when she finishes in Slovenia in a few years, she’ll probably quit and go back to school,” says Roš.
“I was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ You can have both. You can organize your life. But you can’t say it’s the same for men and women because there’s always this conflict in us. With children at home, we can’t go for a beer after a long, stressful day. We run home and maybe do some laundry.”
She takes a realistic view on the likelihood of equality in her profession.
“The nature of the work is not going to change,” she says. “The percentage of women in the industry will always be smaller.” And of that percentage, only a certain percentage again will reach the elite level. “The percentages start to get very small, but it is still a real number.”
Roš, who skied competitively in her youth and nearly trained as a ballet dancer, makes it all look easy.
She describes her cooking as a “patchwork” of influences, rooted in the terroir of the lush Soča Valley where Hiša Franko, a 19thcentury farmhouse in which Ernest Hemingway is said to have recuperated from injury during the First World War, is located.
“Being self-taught has turned out to be an advantage. It makes your cuisine unique. You’re not influenced by one-way thinking. You are more global,” Roš says.
Roš’ “dream meal” is in season now: bitter field chicory simply dressed with brown beans, garlic and olive oil. She doesn’t do signature dishes: “A dish that was created even a year ago doesn’t have a lot to do with what we’re doing now.”
At the moment, her spring menu evokes the countryside around her: think Arctic char with Japanese knotweed, watercress, buttermilk and buckwheat, or walnut meringue, 21-day kefir, pear in camomile, forest honey and pollen ice cream.
Such hyperlocal ingredients may seem at odds with the rich haute cuisine that Roš’ international guests might find in London, Paris or New York, but they give visitors a deep connection with a forgotten landscape and a reason to stray from the standard European foodie itinerary.
Now that she’s been crowned the best female chef, they have one more reason.
“It’s great not only for the restaurant but for the whole destination,” Roš says.