Photographs by Francesco Lastrucci

Every culture has a cuisine that tells its story. Slovenia—a Lilliputian nation about the size of New Jersey but with less than a quarter of its population—has many stories to tell. 

Bordered by Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, the country has a landscape that varies dramatically. In the space of a few hours’ drive, you can see a sweeping span of European scenery and architecture, from Alpine lakes and medieval castles to Adriatic beaches lined with red-roofed villas and olive trees. 

The country’s history is as diverse as its geography. Once part of a Slavic kingdom, Slovenia was later conquered by the Franks, and for 500 years it was ruled by the Hapsburg family. All the while it endured foreign invasions—first the Ottoman Turks, and later the French, after Napoleon briefly conquered the territory. Throughout, Slovenes have retained their own language and ethnic identity, dating back more than a thousand years. In 1991, Slovenia won independence from a fragmenting Yugoslavia and finally became its own nation. All these myriad influences led to the varied and sometimes surprising cuisine that I set out to explore this past spring. 

While hiking near the ski town of Kranjska Gora, on the Austrian border, I gorged on platters of deep-fried and roasted pork with potatoes and sauerkraut, and for dessert, on thick slices of apple strudel and prekmurska gibanica, a pastry stuffed with poppy seeds, walnuts, apples and raisins. On the Adriatic there is seafood risotto and grilled fish. Near the border with Hungary, goulash and other dishes are heavy with paprika. In the Alpine region, home cooks boil up pots of buckwheat and corn zganci (mush) with sides of yogurt, cabbage and fried eggs. The Primorska and Podravje regions produce vaunted wines: The latter, in the northeast, is home to the Blauer Kolner, at more than 400 years of age thought to be the oldest grapevine in the world.

The Julian Alps behind Slovenia’s Vrsic Pass.
The Julian Alps behind Slovenia’s Vrsic Pass. Francesco Lastrucci
Charnel House
The Charnel House, a memorial for Italian soldiers. Over a million Italian soldiers suffered casualties near Slovenia’s Soca River in the dozen Battles of the Isonzo during World War I. Francesco Lastrucci
Kozjak Waterfall
The spectacular Kozjak Waterfall, a 20-minute hike from the Napoleon Bridge, is hidden between cliffs along Kozjak Creek, a tributary of the Soca River. Francesco Lastrucci

Together these varied gastronomic traditions “represent a recognizable culinary identity,” Janez Bogataj, a Slovenian ethnologist, cookbook author and food historian, told me by phone before my trip. Collaborating with the Slovenian government, Bogataj has identified 24 distinctive Slovenian gastronomic regions and 430 representative foods and drinks. Creative chefs have remixed these elements into prizewinning high concepts. As of 2024, ten restaurants in the tiny country had earned Michelin stars, and eight had Michelin Green Stars, a special award for sustainability. As Bogataj puts it, Slovenia’s diverse local food traditions provide chefs “an inexhaustible source of new, modern ideas on plates.” 

Ideas on plates is the perfect way to describe a meal at Hisa Franko, a faded country inn turned three-star Michelin restaurant, run by the self-trained culinary savant Ana Roš. The restaurant is set in the Soca River Valley, and from the patio, I gazed out at the lowlands and hills. Streams, lakes and forests spread out below. The villages had steepled churches and houses with steep gable roofs that finish in hip ends. It was hard to believe that this landscape had been home to some of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century, where 1.2 million soldiers perished in World War I.

Now there was nothing but tranquillity. The pastures were dotted with sheep, goats and cows whose milk is curdled into the region’s famous Tolminc, an earthy cheese with a touch of sweetness Roš incorporates into some of her creations. Like many Slovenian chefs, she prides herself on the superlative quality of local ingredients. A third of the country is farmland, and more than half is covered with forests rich with mushrooms, wild herbs, asparagus, berries and other delicacies that Roš and her staff regularly forage. Not far from her backdoor one can glimpse the silent Italian lagoon, Marano Lagunare, 37 miles to the south, where Roš sources her clams, squid and sea urchins. Just off her patio, a tank of frisky rainbow trout pulses with water siphoned in from a nearby river. 

Roš, the daughter of a doctor, has an uncanny knack for spinning simple ingredients into inscrutable works of art. “I see flavors like a painter sees colors,” she told me. “I taste with my brain, not my tongue.” She was a teenager in 1991 when her country gained independence. Before that, she said, Communist-era restrictions had confined the identity and individuality of the Slovenian people. With independence, “anything was possible,” including a career that seemed far from likely. “I never went to culinary school,” she told me, “and that gave me a sort of freedom.” 

sandwich
A sandwich of delicate wild plants, foraged from nearby forests, appears as part of a tasting menu at Hisa Franko. Francesco Lastrucci
Ros
Chef Ana Ros compares herself to a painter who uses flavors instead of colors. “I taste with my brain, not my tongue,” she says. Francesco Lastrucci
Ros's creations
Ros’s creations include (from top) cappelletti with pear, sunchoke and hazelnuts; orzotto with goat cheese, green beans, mushrooms and truffle; and tagliolini with clams and melon. Francesco Lastrucci

Fluent in five languages, with a degree in international diplomacy from Italy’s University of Trieste, Roš is an eloquent and stirring ambassador of Slovenia and its cuisine, but with a twist. “I like taking risks,” she said. “I hate comfort zones. I find them killers of evolution. I rarely play it safe. It is flavors, not tradition, that define my kitchen. For me, flavor is everything.” 

This approach brings frequent surprises. During a 15-course “50 Shades of Red” tasting menu, I ate my way through three renditions of pasta, including toasted barley risotto (rizota in Slovenian), cooked with wild asparagus and Slovenian truffles; a “sandwich” composed of a pair of nettle disks—one crisp, one soft—filled with cream-fermented beans, prunes and apricots; a potato baked in a hay crust (yes, actual hay) served with roasted-yeast-infused sour cream; and a single strawberry filled with creamed celeriac and horseradish. Both wine and juice pairings were on offer, the latter a procession of bewildering potions ranging from herb-infused barley and buckwheat water to a celeriac, plum and lapsang tea. All told, this experience took roughly three hours. 

All this might sound a bit over-the-top, and, frankly, it is: Roš has elevated Slovenian cuisine to a very high plane. But her insistence on remaining unfettered by tradition left me with an appetite for simpler, more classic fare, and to truly explore Slovenia’s culinary heritage, I would have to look to other kitchens.

Three hours east of Hisa Franko, I came to a longstanding and revered establishment called Hisa Raduha. The restaurant, which is also an inn, is situated in Luce, a charming village perched along the crystalline Savinja River. The day I arrived the mountain backdrop was so breathtaking that it appeared to be Photoshopped. The inn dates back to 1875, and the entrepreneur who purchased it in 1929 was the grandfather of Martina Breznik, the current executive chef and owner. 

Chic in an all-black ensemble accessorized with Harry Potter-style eyewear, Breznik was equal parts elegant and eloquent. Through an interpreter, she confessed that she thinks about food 24/7, and even dreams about it. This was no exaggeration: During my three-day stay, I rarely spotted her outside the inn’s kitchen, dining room or sprawling vegetable gardens. For while Roš cooks from the head, Breznik cooks from the heart. 

“My cooking is what it is because of my grandmother and my mother, who both expressed themselves in this kitchen,” she said. “Those nostalgic dishes made by my ancestors are my foundation, though I approach them in a modern way.”

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Chef Martina Breznik assembles a dish
Chef Martina Breznik assembles a dish. Francesco Lastrucci
the hayrack guesthouse
The hayrack guesthouse. Francesco Lastrucci

Home to five generations, Hisa Raduha is very much a family affair. Filip, Breznik’s son, serves as both sommelier and waiter. Breznik’s husband, Matjaž, a reserved and soft-spoken man, is her sous-chef. Kristina, her daughter, is an architect and has collaborated on renovations of the restaurant and its accompanying guesthouse and outbuildings, some of which are remarkable. One guest room was carved out of a hayrack—a structure used for drying hay that is a hallmark of rural Slovenia. Another room was once a stable, and two others are treehouses on stilts. These accommodations, though far from luxurious by American standards, have been carefully redesigned, with features like hot tubs and terraces that overlook the rocky ridge that Breznik climbed as a girl.

Breznik attended culinary school in Slovenia, but unlike many of her classmates she did not study cooking techniques abroad. Rather, she remained determinedly Slovenian in her vision and approach. “My cooking pays homage to the river, and to the Alps that surround us,” she said. She was an early adherent of the Italian-based Slow Food movement of the late 1980s, a global effort to promote sustainable agriculture while preserving traditional and regional cuisine. Since then, she’s rubbed elbows with many well-known people in the food world, but she eschews celebrity, trends or dishes that require explanation. “I speak not with my voice but through my food,” she told me. “Through taste, we identify as a nation and experience the land.” 

Her most characteristic dishes are reimagined takes on Slovenian classics: She served me a soup of wild garlic; a salad of buckwheat, prosciutto (known locally as prsut) and roasted radicchio; local carp blackened with cuttlefish ink and scattered with fennel served with river trout; and chicken in leek cream on a porridge of Khorasan wheat, an ancient grain related to durum. For dessert, there was a slice of apple poppy-seed roll, flanked with a spoonful of honey-sweetened ice cream anointed with an intense, nutty oil squeezed from the seeds of pumpkins cultivated in the nation’s northeastern regions. I’ll admit that in a lifetime of eating, this meal stood out, not only for its culinary wizardry, but also for the variety and quality of the ingredients.  

smoked trout with garlic and nasturtium, wrapped in kale, served atop nettle cream with carrot cream on the side.
Smoked trout with garlic and nasturtium, wrapped in kale, served atop nettle cream with carrot cream on the side. Francesco Lastrucci
Obrnjenek, a traditional dish of buckwheat flour, milk and cream
Obrnjenek, a traditional dish of buckwheat flour, milk and cream. Francesco Lastrucci
Map
Where to find some of the tastiest delights in Slovenia.  Smithsonian; Map Sources: Wikimedia Commons; Google Maps; Thinkslovenia.com

As a child, Breznik spent long afternoons in the mountains, foraging for mushrooms, berries and herbs. When she and her friends lay flat on the riverbank to fish with their bare hands, she pulled so many trout from the water that her friends laughed at her “duck webbed fingers.” Today, the fish at her restaurant comes mostly from the river, the mushrooms from the surrounding forestland, and the meat and dairy from nearby farms. 

Breznik urged me to visit one of these farms, an Alpine idyll she said was just a 20-minute drive away. I eagerly agreed, unaware that flooding earlier that year had led to the closing of the mountain pass. After backtracking through what seemed like endless switchbacks, I arrived three hours late to find a peaceable kingdom of sheep, goats and the odd donkey grazing like royalty on flower-strewn meadows framed by majestic peaks covered in dense forests of larch and spruce. At 3,800 feet above sea level, the grounds overlooked the renowned Matkov Kot, a secluded glacial valley in the Kamnik-Savinja Alps. 

I knocked on the farmhouse door, and Janja Matk answered, surprised that I wasn’t one of the clients she and her husband, Klemen, were hosting in their guesthouse that evening. She ushered me in, pointed to a seat near an enormous wood-burning stove and offered tea. I declined: I was eager to return outside to that wondrous view. Janja understood. “I feel so privileged to live here and see that every day,” she said. 

The property, which has been in the Matk family since the mid-15th century, has had a sometimes-traumatic history. In World War II, the invading Germans sent the owners to labor camps and incinerated the farmstead. After the war ended, the family returned to rebuild. Janja is proud that the family farm is thriving, but she has no ambition to expand it. “We have five boys and 53 goats,” she told me, laughing. “We don’t want more, because we don’t want to grow beyond what we can handle as a family.”

goat
The goats that provide the milk for Matk Farm’s cheeses, grazing beside the spruce-covered slopes. The farm has been in the same family since the mid-15th century. Francesco Lastrucci
Klemen Matk uses his well-trained nose to check on the aging process in his cheese cellar.
Klemen Matk uses his well-trained nose to check on the aging process in his cheese cellar. Francesco Lastrucci

We found Klemen in the cheese house, an orderly, almost antiseptic building illuminated in harsh fluorescent lighting and lined with shelves. A man of few words, he proudly displayed two dozen or so perfect wheels, several of which would soon be on their way to Breznik’s kitchen. The farm also sells yarn spun from their own wool and is famous for its goat milk ice cream—my sample came flavored with rosemary and honey. Only one type of bee is allowed to be cultivated in Slovenia, the indigenous Carniolan honeybee, and beekeepers pride themselves on the flavor of the final product, which reflects the environment the bees inhabit. Matk honey had the tang of wild pine—befitting, I thought, of this deeply sylvan setting.

Late that afternoon, I drove to Ljubljana, one of the smallest capital cities in Europe. I strolled the town’s car-free center, stopping to buy a box of luscious strawberries at the legendary central market, and gawked at the majestic creations of Jože Plečnik, a Slovenian architect who also designed much of Vienna and Prague. One of his buildings, a five-story secessionist structure, housed a restaurant called JB Restavracija. The restaurant’s founder, a vivacious sexagenarian named Janez Bratovž, is arguably Slovenia’s most storied chef, and his establishment is widely considered the country’s oldest fine-dining destination. 

Like Roš, Bratovž was a trailblazer: As a boy, he ate potatoes, bread and meat if he could get it, and he knew nothing of haute cuisine. Left in the loving care of his grandmother while his parents found work in Germany, he sought solace not in food but in long-distance running. “When I left school, I thought I’d get a job doing construction,” he told me through an interpreter. But his grandmother had other ideas. “She thought I should go to culinary school,” he said. Her reasoning was simple: “Chefs work inside where it’s warm and dry, and they always have food.”  

Bratovž got his first job at a tourist hotel, dishing out goulash, potatoes, pasta, sausages and other local staples. Later, he moved to Austria, where his culinary views broadened, before returning to Slovenia to open a restaurant of his own in Domzale, a town not far from Ljubljana. With two hungry children and too few customers to feed, the next six years were difficult for Bratovž. Then one day he got a call: The Slovenian prime minister, Janez Drnovšek, was coming for lunch. Drnovšek, a vegetarian, ordered a simple pasta dish rather than one of the restaurant’s more elaborate offerings. (Bratovž’s menu currently includes such preparations as ravioli with pistachios, goat curd and foie gras.) Still, the prime minister was impressed and became a regular. Others followed suit, and in 2001, Bratovž moved his restaurant to the capital, where today it lures patrons from around the globe. 

As is typical in this small country, Bratovž intertwines his business with his personal life: His wife, Emma, runs the place. His son, Tomaž, is a fellow chef who works with him in the kitchen, and his daughter, Nina, is a sommelier who oversees the wine list as well as customer service. The Bratovžs purchase their saltwater fish and shellfish from a single boat, manned by a family of fishers whose nets are designed to allow small fish to escape unscathed. The olive oil comes from a family of growers in nearby Istria, and the salt is harvested by a family of farmers in the coastal Slovenian city of Piran, where production methods have barely changed for 700 years. “It’s very difficult to eat badly in Slovenia, because we can grow or forage the best raw ingredients,” Tomaž told me over a glass of a regional sparkling wine.

Workers harvest salt in Piran, across from Venice on the Adriatic Coast. Janez Bratovž of JB Restavracija uses this salt at his Ljubljana establishment.
Workers harvest salt in Piran, across from Venice on the Adriatic Coast. Janez Bratovž of JB Restavracija uses this salt at his Ljubljana establishment. Francesco Lastrucci
A fish swims through the crystal-clear waters of the Soca River. Much of the fish served at Slovenia’s finest restaurants come straight from this pristine water source.
A fish swims through the crystal-clear waters of the Soca River. Much of the fish served at Slovenia’s finest restaurants come straight from this pristine water source. Francesco Lastrucci

Like Roš, the Bratovžs source freshwater trout from the Soca River, including the rare marble trout indigenous to the region. During World War I, hungry soldiers lobbed grenades into the river and skimmed off the dead fish. The species was further diluted when fishermen, hoping to boost the river’s overall fish population, introduced brown trout, creating a hybrid species. In the mid-1990s, a research institute called Tour du Valat strove to resuscitate marble trout, and over the next few decades, genetically pure marble trout were once again found in headwaters of the Soca River. The Tolmin Angling Club, a conservation society that has hatched and raised marble trout since 1989, opened a new fish farm in 2015, not far from Hisa Franko.

Bratovž told me that, perhaps counterintuitively, almost any animal species is more likely to survive if it is a sought-after delicacy. This is true not only of marble trout but also of venison, wild boar and even bear, all of which appear on his menu. “Animals don’t need help in Slovenia, because we cherish them,” he told me. “Every animal here has a fantastic life.” (Vegetarians may not agree, but the livestock I observed grazing the fields and meadows of Slovenia did appear to lead lives nearly as blissful as those of the humans who feast on them.)

Slovenia’s high-end restaurants have brought hordes of foreign visitors to even the most far-flung regions of the country, but in my time there, I saw few locals seated at their tables, which seemed priced for the jet-setting crowd. Still, there were plenty of other, lower-budget options that reflected the nation’s rich culture and history. On my final day in the country, I stopped at a cluster of homes that passed for a village. There were no fancy restaurants here or even cafés, only a single stand selling burek, a traditional Turkish phyllo dough pastry stuffed with meat, cheese or spinach. Tantalized, I stood in line behind a bevy of men in work-clothes, whom I later joined outside at an upturned barrel doubling as a table. Cheap and filling, burek was long considered déclassé by Slovenia’s monied set, and few self-respecting Slovenian super-chefs would include it on their menu. For some reason, knowing that made my lunch all the tastier. 

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Veteran journalist and author Ellen Ruppel Shell is currently writing a book about the eels of Maine.

Francesco Lastrucci is a photographer based in Italy whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, among others.