Hostinec u Krivého potoka

The restaurant & setting. Martin arrives in the village of Betliar in eastern Slovakia, right next to the famous Betliar manor, where tourism flourishes and the food business should flourish too, and yet someone called him here. Hostinec u Krivého potoka has been running for 14 years and takes its name from the stream that bends slightly „into the crooked" near the park. At the entrance Martin is amused by a trilingual sign, „vždy čerstvé, vždy chutné, always fresh" ("always fresh, always tasty"), a mix of English and German, „or someone really botched the translating". The kitchen is assembled from whatever they found at home, stainless counters from an uncle, cupboards from grandma and the previous owner, an extractor hood from a neighbour, a retro „grandma" style dictated by their finances and their „crazy beginnings".

The people. This is an all-women family operation. The heart and creator of the kitchen is mum Juliana Gočová, 67, who invented the halušky, the gemerské gulky and almost every dish, but whose health no longer lets her work as she once did, „my legs won't obey". The whole business is run, and the finances held, by her daughter Zuzka, who dreamed up the restaurant to fulfil her mum's wish, and without whom, everyone agrees, they would be lost. It pains the mother most, because Zuzka sacrificed her youth and her private life to it, with no partner and no children. Helping out are sister Renátka on the floor, Mirka, kitchen helper Evka, and Zdenka, who started as a helper but has a good palate and now cooks. They began as an ordinary pub and gradually decided to start cooking, going five years without drawing a wage. „We didn't know what a paycheck was," Zuzka recalls.

Why they called Martin. Julka herself called him, because in a village beside the manor where tourists pour in, almost no one comes to eat. Martin hunts for the one problem holding everything back, and is increasingly surprised that it is not the food. The real reason is that these women undermine their own honest place, lacking self-confidence, visual appeal and the ability to sell themselves, and everything they earn in season gets eaten up again over winter. „I've never seen people who cook excellent food undermine their own place the way you do."

The first visit. Martin orders across the whole menu to taste it all at once. The chicken broth is good, but they forgot to salt it, „salt? we forgot". The Spanish bird, by contrast, is luxurious, „honest, good, the meat is tender, a great dish", and the buckwheat pirohy with bryndza and butter are for him „really nailed, phenomenal". The gemerské gulky are excellent and homemade, the Segedín goulash good, though the homemade dumpling is a touch denser than it should be. The frog legs that Betliar is famous for, since the locals are nicknamed „frog-eaters", are among the less successful, missing something to dip into. The biggest eyesore is the pizza, the only one in the village, which Martin says ruins the whole concept, plus a baffling „pizza A and pizza B" at the same price despite wildly different costs. The chicken salad lost him, „the first half was excellent, in the second half it started to fade". The overall impression is a surprise: „Three little steps take me up into a restaurant with pleasant food."

The diagnosis. Martin names the root of the problem plainly: „There's no problem with the food here." The problem is the look and the confidence. From outside it reads as a pub, not a restaurant, the kitchen to him is one big maze pieced together from household scraps, and even the road sign points more toward the church than the venue. Then there is money, since everything earned gets eaten away over winter, and above all the fact that Zuzka grafts for two, has no private life, and the whole family forgets about itself. At the same time Martin is moved by how, even in tough conditions, they keep their hygiene, with the meat vacuum-sealed, wrapped and dated. „I have to restart the cogs in their heads a bit, because I can teach cooking, but to do this, that'll be a massacre."

The reset. Martin first takes a tour of the manor and joins a group of tourists, whom he promptly invites to lunch as a stress test and asks to write a review. The result is brutal: the bryndza halušky take 40 minutes, because everything is made to order with nothing prepped in advance. „You're not cooking at home for the family at the stove on a Sunday," Martin explains, since 80 percent of their customers are tourists from the manor who won't wait that long. To get the women out of the kitchen, he arranges a big surprise for mum, the 65th birthday party they never managed to throw for five years, relatives included. Meanwhile he brings in his friend Miro from Gastrokuchyne.sk, the place gets a €2,000 Tesco grocery voucher, and the old chalet-style kitchen becomes a fully functional, proper kitchen with a new grill, shelves, lighting and curtains.

New concept & menu. No rebrand, Martin sticks to who they are, honest traditional dishes, just in a modern guise. He pre-cooks a mushroom soup with vegetables and a bryndza soup as „our Slovak gold" for the tourists. He reworks the frog legs, not fried but marinated in lemon juice, garlic and parsley and grilled, served with mayonnaise to dip. For vegetarians he adds potato dumplings filled with mushroom cream, fried onion, watercress and browned butter. For the men, a roast pork neck finished on the grill with root vegetables and potato mash topped with toasted poppy seeds. The classic is a pheasant perkelt from the legs with potato šúľance and dill, and for the road a savoury cabbage-and-bacon yeast cake plus a sweet plum one with crumble. „Did I get it right, is it okay?" „Perfectly."

The big night. Martin wants them to cook themselves, from the heart, but he installs a system where everything is prepped and only the final step is done to order, plus clear roles. Zuzka reads the orders and serves the soups, Mirka does the frogs, mum does the pheasant and the pork neck, Zdenka the dumplings. But at the first sign of stress the women revert to their old system, sending food out before the guests have finished their soup, the starters don't arrive together, and the kitchen starts to grind. Martin has to raise his voice, „when the rooster gets angry, it crows", and mum is unhappy. Of everything he showed them, they took only ten percent instead of ninety. „The girls took a lot of steps backwards," he admits, disappointed, but he trusts that in a month they will take the best of it.

One month later. A month on, Martin returns and Betliar is visibly coming alive, with locals and tourists coming in. The bryndza halušky go out in nine minutes, beautifully creamy with the bryndza coming through, and the dumplings are nicely browned and crisp. The main change is the system: only one person now stands at the order slips and calls to the whole kitchen, and the women finally relay and communicate, exactly what failed completely during the final service. Martin runs one more stress test with invited guests to see how they cope with more people in the room, and the kitchen holds up. The guests praise the bryndza soup and the pheasant perkelt, „it was fairly quick and the food was superb".

Verdict: Martin recognises that the women grasped the essential thing, that a kitchen needs a head and a system, and that they set off on the right path. The problem was never the food but the confidence and the organisation, and that is exactly where they did a big piece of work. „Love each other, take care of each other, keep grafting," he signs off, leaving the message that their customers are what matters most, the mirror of their work. 4 knives.