Hashtag Pub

The restaurant & setting. The second episode of the first season of Na Nože is filmed by Martin Novák in eastern Slovakia, in the village of Ľubica near Kežmarok, under the Tatra mountains. Here stands Hashtag Pub, a beer-and-burger sports pub that the owners built and fitted out essentially by themselves. In the first years after opening it was always full and people loved coming here, but after covid it quietened down and today it is half empty. At the back is a year-round smoking room you can smell throughout the place, and on his way in Martin immediately runs into neglected, sticky and greasy tables.

The people. The owner is Štefan, who goes by Števo. The restaurant is his business, but alongside it he builds his own house and goes digging with an excavator as a hobby, to relax and to top up the wages. He is happily divorced, raises two small children on his own, and only comes to the pub in the morning to unlock and in the evening to look in. The service is run by waitress Tinka, real name Tína, who is twenty-four and has been here from the very start. In the kitchen cooks Maťo, in his second year at the pub, who shows up to work every day at 12.05, five minutes after opening. Maťo has his children at the nursery across the way, and Štefan arranged the job so he could be close to them.

Why they called Martin. Hashtag is sinking, the takings are not there, and Štefan openly admits that if it carries on like this he will not last until summer and will have to close the place, lay people off and quit. He does not want to suffer the ultimate disgrace of shutting down and scrapping what he built. He has lost his vision and does not know how to draw people back, so he calls Martin to find out where it all went wrong.

The first visit. Martin sits down as the first customer and orders across the menu. He immediately sees that the cook is not at work yet, the waitress barely manages to open up, and the coffee machine is broken, or rather switched off to save energy. The soup pleasantly surprises him, it is excellent, well seasoned, well balanced, nothing to fault, but everything else is a disaster. The plates are covered in grease, the pizza is dried out and flavourless like a flatbread, the onion rings swim in oil, the wings have rubbery skin, and the XL cheeseburger is huge, dry and served on a slate you cannot eat from. He waits forty-two minutes for the last dish. „Za štyridsaťdva minút si z Bratislavy do Trnavy prídeš." What annoys him most is that a cook who can make such a great soup then ruins the wings.

The diagnosis. Martin tells Štefan straight that first he has to admit his own faults and start with himself. Štefan is a leader who signals indifference to his staff, never comes in, is too soft and acts as a buddy rather than a boss, so Maťo and Tinka do as they please and bicker all evening. Tinka pushes the cook to work faster, Maťo keeps his own pace, and any sense of teamwork is gone. Martin presses Štefan until he gets out of him what really eats at him inside, a thirty-year mortgage, a pile of other bills, and the fact that he has lost the habit of work and assumed others would do it for him. Štefan is close to tears, and Tinka honestly feels sorry for him too.

The reset. Since hardly anyone knows about Hashtag, Martin flips it, „when the customers don't come to you, we'll go to them". On the square in Kežmarok he sets up a stall where the team hands out burgers and Štefan turns out to be a natural showman who strikes up a conversation with everyone. Maťo and Tinka finally settle down and start helping each other. Martin also visits a local butcher, where he finds a homemade sausage made to a recipe from Štefan's father's old notebook, and refines it into a new dish. A new oven goes into the kitchen, the pub gets new billboards, and the team blows off steam together at a teambuilding session in a wind tunnel.

New concept & menu. Martin prepares honest pub food for Hashtag, because a sports bar is about football, beer and good food, and the convenience products are finished. He presents a pea cream soup with seared pork collar and grilled root vegetables, duck livers sautéed with garlic and topped with duck fat, chicken strips in yoghurt with homemade sweet-potato fries, a pulled-pork sandwich with barbecue sauce, and the main draw, the Hashtag hot dog with the homemade spicy sausage, Viennese-style onions and cheddar. To finish there is a chocolate espuma with raspberries and a pancake with blueberries and cream. The team loves everything, though Maťo is a little overwhelmed by so many new dishes at once.

The big night. For the big night Maťo has to run the kitchen on his own for the first time, his trial by fire, because tomorrow Martin will be gone. At first a handful of guests is manageable, but once the place fills up Maťo falls apart, stops keeping up, runs short of sides and dessert, and wants to give up. Martin pulls him outside, gives him a break, and convinces him that he is not a heat-and-serve cook but a real chef. Maťo comes back, gets into a rhythm, and they get through the evening together, even with delays of thirty minutes. Near the end a broken till receipt roll briefly causes panic, but they sort that out too, and the pub is fuller than it has been all year.

One month later. A classic one-month-later return does not happen in this episode, the whole transformation runs over three days and the close is summed up by the narrator. As he leaves, Martin says a cooking star has been born here, a self-doubting man turned into a confident chef. The team believes Hashtag has been saved and that the crew will stay the same.

Verdict: The first season of Na Nože did not yet have the knife rating, so Martin awards no score and gives only a verbal assessment. It is clearly positive, and he rates the transformation as a success. After the reset Hashtag is full every evening, the new bestseller is the Hashtag hot dog, cook Maťo finally comes to work on time and Tinka no longer has to switch on the grill for him, they have stopped arguing and help each other. Štefan has meanwhile finished his house and can now devote himself fully to the business. For Martin the biggest win is that the people changed, the cook found confidence, the cook and waitress found peace, and the owner finally came back to his business.