Janez Bratovž

What a man Janez Bratovž, Lubiana’s number one chef and notorious face to all the tv-viewers east of north-eastern Italy. Cheerful face, hearty laugh and as see-through as the flavors he learned to put on a dish in a 35 years old experience. Hidden with his family behind the door of his art nouveau-retrò restaurant on central Miklošičeva street, he likes to cook the four elements: «the saltiness of water, bitterness of fire, sourness of air and sweet minerality of earth», he says today. In short, the Empledocles of Ljubljanica valley. Who felt the need to cross the borders of his country, in a time when the Iron Curtain didn’t allow easily Yugoslavian people to leave their country.
On 1975, 13 years old, he already liked to reject the teachings of his Lubiana hotel management teachers: «they told me to do well as many recipes as I could but I said: no! I’d rather do few but with a strong identity». His tough character got tougher in the period 1987-1992, when working at Tschebull Inn in Egg am Faaker See, Austria. With a Mediterranean-international-alpine know how on his luggage he came back home and opened his first restaurant: only four tables and a new gastronomic vocabulary for the Slovenians: carpaccio, shrimp and just grilled meat. Meanings he soon deepened elsewhere: Da Vittorio in Bergamo («great professionals, great experience!»),

’s Louis XV in Monaco, Chicago and again Salzburg, Austria.

Then he met Adrià at the Spanish congress of Madrid Fusión and foams started populating his dishes. But mildly and always as a weapon for a praiseworthy challenge: to reproduce his childhood favorite recipes, for example pig meat, without cooking the ingredient himself but only other great raw materials of land. Which sounds like a trompe l’œil that fools the palates of slovenians who stopped suffering from nostalgia.