Piti-Piti-Pa (Wasim)

The restaurant & setting. We are in Košice, Slovakia's second largest city, and more precisely inside the Optima shopping centre, right by the entrance to the cinema. The restaurant Piti-Piti-Pá is themed entirely around film, the motifs and posters around it evoke a movie hall, and Martin even sits down „beneath my favourite film". The owner, Wasim, took over the Optima venue recently from another owner, alongside his older pizzeria in the courtyard. Later in the episode he will try to rename and completely rebuild this new restaurant under his own name, Wasim.

The people. The owner is Wasim, who introduces himself as a guy from Prešov with a Slovak mother and an Assyrian father, so he is close to Arabic culture. His support is his wife, Marianna Zahra, who does not interfere directly in the business but stands by him. The kitchen is run by head chef Kubo, whom even Martin calls a genuinely good cook. The floor is staffed by waitresses including Martina, Laura, Ina and Lenka, and alongside Kubo a young woman named Nina is learning to cook, she comes from Ukraine and has been in Slovakia for four years. It is Laura whom Wasim will later promote to restaurant manager.

Why they called Martin. Wasim is, as he says himself, „destroyed". He took the venue from a friend he trusted, only to find that the takings and the work were not real, and after he took over the revenue dropped by more than half. To get into it he mortgaged his flat, and now he is at a loss of roughly fifteen thousand euros a month. The restaurant sits in a lucrative spot, yet it gapes empty while the rest of the food court is full, and Wasim needs an expert's advice on how to save it.

The first visit. Martin sits down and orders across the whole menu: a Thai coconut soup, a coconut curry with prawns, macaroni, a medium rare beef steak, mini tortillas and a mushroom risotto. And, surprise, the food is largely good. The Tom Yam style coconut soup is excellent, with clear coriander and fish sauce. The steak is exactly how a medium rare steak should look, earning a big thumbs up. The risotto is creamy and honest. Weaker is the curry, which lacks the real Thai ingredients, the macaroni is „tragically overcooked", and the tortillas come with a clearly shop-bought cocktail sauce. The biggest problem, though, is not on the plate but in the air: the staff are silent, tense, everything is whispered, and Martin sits in a completely empty restaurant while the neighbouring places are packed.

The diagnosis. Martin names the root of the problem bluntly and clearly: the food is good, the location is good, but the venue has no leader and an internal war is raging in the team. „Either you sort yourselves out here, or I will not help you," he tells the staff, who quarrel two metres from the customers. The guest feels that atmosphere too, and that is why the restaurant is empty. He pins the basic mistake on Wasim himself, because the venue has no one to lead it. So at the end of day one he stands Wasim up and proposes that Laura become the manager.

The reset. The squabbling continues on the second day too, especially the bickering over order counts between Kubo and Laura, and Martin sees that nothing has changed. He therefore calls in business coach and mentor Monika Mihoková, who runs a card exercise with the team and tries to teach them to get along. Martin himself then stays in the empty kitchen that evening and cooks a whole Oriental menu, inspired by Wasim's Assyrian roots, to show the owner the direction and identity the place is missing.

New concept & menu. Martin builds on Arabic and Oriental cuisine, which is close to Wasim's heart and unique in Košice. At the tasting he presents stuffed vine leaves (jelenji), mutabal, moussaka, hummus, falafel, za'atar chips from Arabic bread, lamb cutlets and meat with grilled vegetables, rice and okra, a shish kebab of minced lamb, and baklava. „This is a knockout, unbelievable," is the verdict on the lamb. Wasim still hesitates over whether the people of Košice will like it, so they take the food out into the shopping centre, where people react wonderfully and Wasim starts to believe.

The big night. Around seventy guests arrive for the gala evening and the food draws praise, even guests who lived in Syria for forty years say the flavours are exactly the same. But in the kitchen it boils differently: head chef Kubo is angry, feels he was given recipes without instructions and too little time, and essentially writes off the concept and throws it in the bin. „I told you I will never forget this to you," he erupts. The waitresses on the floor, according to Martin, gave their best performance, yet anger and distrust radiate from the kitchen.

One month later. Martin returns after a while and the restaurant is full, which is a good sign, and the name Wasim has stayed. But the menu is almost the same as before, with only hummus, mutabal, falafel and Arabic bread added, roughly three new items. Otherwise there are still schnitzels, Thai and Asian dishes, the same identity-less „goulash". The new Oriental soup and combo are excellent, which makes Martin all the more sorry, because they have it in them to cook a whole menu like this. It emerges that the concept was carried mainly by Laura and partly by Kubo, but the final say lay with the owner, who wanted things under control and in the end backed away from the full transformation.

Verdict: Martin awards 2 knives, one for having added something at all, and one because the food tasted good to him, with the message that they have it in them to make it more interesting than the competition around them. On his next visit, if there is more of that bold Oriental concept here, he promises to swap the rating.