Heydučka

The restaurant & setting. We're in Bratislava, the city where Martin was born and where he still has memories of the old Prior store and the Dunaj department store. Heydučka, on Heydukova street, isn't quite a restaurant; it feels more like a city café or wine bar, with a rotating display case of the day's offer right inside the door. „Neviem, či toto patrí do roku 24, 25," Martin quips about the interior. The place was born out of necessity: the building's previous restaurant went bust and the landlord took it over to keep his lunch crowd.

The people. The owner is Robo, a former banker who runs the whole building and took the restaurant „on himself" because it's not his core business. He's helped by his son Jakub Kret, a fresh financial-and-actuarial-mathematics graduate from Prague who co-invests in the place. The heart of the kitchen is Jozef „Frenky" Berek (born 1967), who has carried the nickname Frenky for 30 years and has cooked since the age of eighteen. His right hand, his „squire", is Majo (Marián), with young Andrej helping out and Viki running the floor.

Why they called Martin. Robo isn't satisfied: the business isn't growing, it's stagnating, and he „struggles a bit with people." The whole restaurant rises and falls on the head chef, who has a globe-trotting, master-craftsman reputation, yet two years have shown it doesn't work the way the owner expected. „Suddenly we're not growing, we're stagnating, so I'm asking where the problem is."

The first visit. Martin orders across an entire menu stuffed with meaningless „menu, business menu, this menu, that menu." A parade of disasters follows: a weak, under-seasoned broth in a smeared bowl, papardele a la vodka „boiled to death," a sauce that tastes „like a school canteen," a grilled canned peach with a salty salad: „that combination is awful." The peak is a pork tenderloin with „chimichurri" that is nothing of the sort: „You probably don't even know what chimichurri is." It was a bought semi-product. Martin sums it up: „For me, this is the eighties."

The diagnosis. The kitchen inspection uncovers a catastrophe: cheese 4 and even 8 months past its date, a nearly year-old dumpling, mouldy mushrooms, fish „identified as trout," and a canned fossil. „I caught 10 things today, all went in the bin." Martin closes the place on the spot: „Write 'closed for technical reasons.'" But the confrontation with Frenky breaks into a human story: the chef had been ill since January (severe pneumonia, lost 15 kg) and had stopped watching the kitchen. His extraordinary life unfolds: abandoned by his mother at thirteen days old, adopted twice, he only found his birth mother in his thirties and she died within a year. „I'd sum up his life by the state of that kitchen."

The reset. After dumping the spoiled stock and cleaning up, Martin pushes the owners to pitch in: „it doesn't matter that you're the owner's son; if there's no one to wash dishes, you step up." Frenky gets his chance to shine with „the cook's revenge," but in the kitchen things turn, instead of cooking, into a „mathematical-geometric olympiad" over brownie gram weights, both he and Jakub hold state exams in mathematics. Martin drives a new red slicer over from Bardejov, his friend Míro from gastrokuchyne.sk adds dishware, a mixer and a blender, and friends from Tesco gift 2,000 € for quality ingredients.

New concept & menu. The restaurant is reborn as a cosy tapas bar. Martin and his team spend the whole night giving the interior some flair, and Viki, who didn't want to come yesterday, now says: „Yes now, cosier." Martin presents the new menu himself: chicken-liver paté with wild-cranberry jam and sourdough bread, antipasti, a cheese plate, tomato pesto with sun-dried tomatoes, capers and parmesan, egg papardele, a medium grilled beef flank with a real South-American chimichurri salsa, and a chocolate brownie to finish.

The big night. With forty guests the kitchen launches into chaos: the lads „stall," Frenky can't keep up with answers, and yet only two dishes are even being cooked. Martin has to take over the pass and split up the tasks, but the night eventually stabilises. The key moment comes at dessert: when there aren't enough whole pieces, the team chooses to apologise rather than send out a flawed brownie. That is exactly what pleases Martin most: „This is the first moment you changed."

One month later. A month on Martin returns to Bratislava and takes a blow: Frenky is gone. For health reasons he won't return, „he can't cook without his arm," and the team is arranging housing and social care for him. The new cook, Milan, handles the starters, but the mains collapse: dry, under-seasoned papardele with no truffle, meat „like pulling out a drowned man": pale, boiled, not grilled. Three plates go back, the flank steak runs out, and Martin ends up fixing the pasta right at the stove.

Verdict: Martin admits his disappointment that today's dishes failed, yet he recognises real progress: cleanliness, order and labelled items in the fridges. „The operation moved things forward, and that's exactly why it earned two knives." He also sends a message to the departed Frenky, wishing him better health, and since he's a Bratislava native he promises he'll drop by again for a check.