Javorina Pub 21

The restaurant & setting. Martin headed east, to a Košice suburb called Šaca, where on a small housing estate, wedged between an ice-cream shop, a pawnshop, a kebab joint and a grocery, sits Javorina Pub 21. The name is no accident: a pub called Javorina stood on this very spot for over 40 years. The owner gutted and rebuilt it and opened in May 2019, right as the Ice Hockey World Championship kicked off: "it was completely sold out, the atmosphere like a stadium." Then COVID hit, and afterwards "it never really got going again."

The people. The owner is Egon Kuči, 44, married, with a six-week-old daughter he "leaves in the morning and comes home to find asleep in her cot." The backbone of the place is his mother Mária, a former economist who retired, came "to help", and ended up running it and bankrolling it; everyone calls her Babina. Cooking here for four years is Monika, divorced, a brand-new grandmother, who spent her whole career before that in a works canteen: "she's not our cook any more, she's family." A server, Veronika, appears briefly at the start.

Why they called Martin. "I'd need some kind of reset for the place, because it just isn't working." Post-COVID revenue dropped to a quarter, the old crowds stopped coming, and the family is keeping the business afloat purely out of their own savings. Egon hoped Martin could find the spark to bring guests back.

The first visit. Martin sat down and ordered across the menu, and the hell of Slovak gastro opened up: "pizza, kebab, burger, because that's what people want." The glasses were clouded with limescale because the pub has no dishwasher and washes by hand: "and ugh, when I run a finger over it, ugh." The kebab was rubbery, clearly sliced off a frozen cone and reheated in a microwave, the bun cold. The "Stroganoff" wasn't Stroganoff but chicken in paprika. The peak of the "pyramid of awful taste" was the Tučniak and Krembery pizza with a split cream base tasting "like soured milk", topped with a spoon of cheap cranberries, top 3 worst things he's ever tasted. Then butter two months past its date and kebab meat four months past. And the owner had never even tasted his own pizza: "I'd rather not, with what I can see in it."

The diagnosis. Martin's verdict was blunt: the family lives in the past, in "how it was before COVID", and copies the competition 20 metres away instead of offering something of their own. The hardest blow came when he asked what Egon is proud of in his own place: "nothing, when it comes to the food." "Why should I as a customer come, if you yourself aren't proud of anything in your place?" That conversation also surfaced Babina's burden: she has poured close to €250,000 of her lifetime savings into the place and is still subsidising the losses.

The reset. First the kitchen: not clean enough on the first try, but they nailed it on the second and Martin gave credit. He pulled Egon away from the bar ("take off your clothes, go and save your own place") and took him to scout the competition so he could see with his own eyes what the neighbours do. A friend from Gastro Kuchyňenská installed a dishwasher with a water softener overnight, ending the cloudy glasses. Tesco donated €2,000 in groceries, and Monika got professional kitchen gear "we'd never have bought in our lives."

New concept & menu. No rename, but a clear shift: Javorina is a beer pub, so the food should pair with beer. Martin left a set of dishes: fried Olomouc cheese in beer batter, a pork paprika-garlic neck cut from a local butcher, salted duck fat with onion for bread, beer goulash, homemade stuffing with duck leg and plums, hearty čevapčiči with ajvar, semolina pudding for dessert and savoury pagáče. "That duck with the stuffing and plums, it's a killer." Egon's task was to hand out flyers and pitch the place over the local radio.

The big night. An hour before opening a fuse blew and the kitchen lost its lights, and they cooked by phone light ("In the dark. In the dark."). Communication between kitchen and floor fell apart: starters went out late, mains went cold, paprika paste was served instead of ajvar, and guests waited an hour and a half. Martin had to halt the whole service briefly ("everything away, away, away") and rebuild the team from scratch. They got there in the end, but only just.

One month later. A month on, Martin returned to Šaca. The good news: sales had nudged up, payroll had been met, more locals and Košice guests were coming, and the tvarôžky were the big hit. The bad news: Monika was holding the whole kitchen alone, no second cook had been found, and the menu had slid back to plain schnitzel and fried cheese, no progress. The tvarôžky were firm, not melty, the potato placka "muddy" and not crisp. The last-chance dish, a Nováková roast made out of love, turned out edible, and was good.

Verdict: Martin left honestly disappointed ("there were more bad dishes than I expected") and awarded Javorina 1 knife, mainly because a month on most of his recommendations hadn't stuck and the place was drifting back to its old ways. Even so, he grew fond of Babina and Monika and wished them well, hoping people would finally find their way to the restaurant. (The recording ends a few seconds before the rating is handed over; the 1-knife score is per the show's database.)