Penzión Janošík

The restaurant & setting. This time Martin heads beneath the Belianske Tatras to the village of Ždiar, home to the family-run Penzión Janošík. The owner's parents built it in 1995 and 1996 on his mother's land, and it is named after the national hero and outlaw Juraj Jánošík, who greets guests right at the entrance. The guesthouse is frozen in the nineties, the corridor looks „like after an explosion" and the kitchen is every bit as retro as the building. The clientele is almost entirely ski trips, outdoor schools and families with children, with outside walk-ins all but gone.

The people. The place is run by owner Rado, who grew up here alongside his father and now tries to restore the guesthouse to its nineties glory after his parents fell ill. Beside him stands his wife Andrea, also called Aďa, with two waitresses in service, both by coincidence named Maja. In the kitchen is young cook Vlado, who has been cooking for fourteen years and who called Martin in, because he wants to convince the boss to embrace more modern gastronomy. A thirteen-year-old son helps with the order cards, and the children's groups are looked after by group leader Marta Čála, who is vegan.

Why they called Martin. The core of the problem lies in money and in clashing visions. Full-day meals for a single child cost only around seven euros, far too little to cook well, and Rado keeps repeating that he cannot work magic and squeeze any more out of it. Vlado believes in the guesthouse's potential and wants change, but the boss holds him back. The young cook even declares that if they fail to supply him with proper ingredients, he will pack up and leave, and Martin senses from the very first conversation that something here does not add up.

The first visit. Martin has lunch with the children and is immediately put off by a dirty plate, since tableware should be clean everywhere, in a luxury restaurant and in a children's camp alike. The soup is just „a paprika water that is very lightly seasoned", and the cabbage flat noodles are undercooked, so-called „al demente", half-raw pasta with raw flour in the middle. The children dislike it and plate after plate comes back full. Martin is genuinely horrified by what the children drink too, reading cyclamate, saccharin, sodium benzoate and monosodium glutamate off the labels, a veritable „young chemists' club".

The diagnosis. Martin names the root cause directly, a cook with fourteen years behind him should manage even without a service counter, because making flat noodles is not nuclear physics. The confrontation, however, turns onto Rado, who buys the cheapest ingredients, Polish chicken breasts pumped full of water and syrup from a canister that looks like car antifreeze. „You buy shit meat and then tell me it's bad in Slovakia too," Martin erupts. The emotional turning point comes when he points out that children do not choose their food and adults decide for them, and he pushes through a rise in the daily rate from seven to fifteen euros.

The reset. The next day Martin gives Vlado a chance to show what he can do, and the cook prepares deep-fried ice cream in cereal with strawberry salsa and vanilla sabayon, a retro dessert Martin remembers from twenty years ago and genuinely enjoys. Together they rename it Jánošík's balls as a playful local nod to the outlaw. Since the guesthouse runs on only three burners, Martin orders a new range and equipment from gastrokuchyne.sk, brought over by his friend Mirko from Bardejov, and agrees with Rado on a budget of up to fifteen euros a day.

New concept & menu. There is no big rebrand here, it is more a return to honest, fresh cooking for children with intolerances in mind. Overnight Martin and Vlado prepare breakfast, banana bread, a savoury quiche with salad and coconut millet as a modern replacement for semolina porridge. For dinner he proposes a balanced tomato soup, sweet potato and celeriac creams for children with allergies, a turkey-breast paprikash with dumplings, chicken skewers marinated in yoghurt and rice noodles with vegetables, leaving the dessert traditional with semolina balls. Vlado is utterly carried away by the soup.

The big night. Breakfast goes well for the children and everyone is pleasantly surprised, but dinner collapses right at the start. Under pressure Vlado throws his apron into the imaginary ring and walks out with the words „sorry, I'm done cooking, for good", something Martin has not seen in over twenty years of practice. He is left alone with the owners, cooking and plating, yet the cook had managed only a single tray of side dish for forty-six portions, so dinner is salvaged only by improvising with skewers and leftover breakfast salad. So the children would not go hungry for the next three days, Martin calls in his friend, cook Peter, who runs a place nearby and takes over the operation.

One month later. A month on Martin returns to Ždiar out of season and the snow has melted. Vlado is gone and at the stove stands a new cook, Aurel, who has never cooked in a restaurant, only at home for his own children. The syrups have been swapped for better ones, but the food is once again a disaster, broth with no taste or salt, bread bitter and over-baked, chicken coated in starch and deep-fried, and every third grain of rice raw and hard. Meanwhile laughter drifts from the kitchen, as though Rado did not care how it turned out, and Martin notes that he sees only words, not a real result.

Verdict: 0 knives. Martin awards Penzión Janošík 0 knives, zero, because he could not honour this kitchen with any sticker at all. „It would be very unfair, because every other restaurant that got even a few knives made real progress," he explains, but here he simply does not feel that shift. What troubles him most is what the children are served, and he tells the family they still have work to do and must build something positive out of the negative experience.