Pizza Pub Tank

The restaurant & setting. We're in Banská Bystrica, on the Fončorda housing estate, where a place called Pizza Pub Tank has been running for twelve years. Martin likes estate restaurants because they have a loyal community of customers right under their windows, but the first impression knocks him back: "This can't even be a working business." The building looks like a run-down den, the sign is awful, and inside everything is mixed with everything else, an Italian village on the wall, a wall built of pizza boxes, and right next to it a pickled cheese sausage. Martin asks the basic question: is this an Italian restaurant, a pizzeria, or a pub?

The people. The place is run by Marcela (44), a former model and once a Miss contestant, who started here at nineteen with a small disco and went through a kebab shop and a café before landing on the pizzeria. "I throw myself into everything head first," she admits. The kitchen, though, is held up by her mother, seventy-eight-year-old "babina" Alena Macková, who comes to cook every day from five in the morning, takes no wages, and puts everything aside for her grandchildren. Her father helps too, a self-taught handyman for everything from painting to electrics, along with a waitress, two pizza cooks, and a certain Marek who does "marketing" here. Marcela has two children and for years has been taking out loans just to keep the place alive.

Why they called Martin. After ten years the restaurant still doesn't stand on its own feet, only twenty or thirty meals are cooked a day, and Marcela leans on her ageing parents for everything instead of hiring a cook. Both babina and the grandfather toil from dawn in their seventies, and that is what burns Martin the most. The place has no clear identity and no direction, and Marcela hopes Martin will show her which way to go.

The first visit. Martin orders across the menu and the à-la-carte card, and the disaster is impossible to miss. The daily soup arrives lukewarm, though the cabbage soup pleasantly surprises him. The pizza dough is over-proofed and collapsed, the crust dry, and all you can taste is garlic and chilli. The salad is a plain bagged supermarket mix smothered in hot bacon, with a "French" dressing they mixed themselves from ketchup, mustard and yogurt. The Chinese chicken runs on MSG, no one dares to make a gordon bleu, and Martin waits a full hour for the ribs. "You're the new record-holder on this show," he quips. Of nine dishes only one wins him over, the Moravian sparrow. "One dish out of nine."

The diagnosis. Martin names the root cause bluntly: the place doesn't know what it wants to be. "Here we have ribs, here we have Chinese, here we have Czech cuisine. What are you? Who are you?" Marcela bursts into tears, but Martin doesn't soften: she didn't call him here to hug her and tell her it's wonderful, he came to ring the alarm clock. The second problem is even more delicate, Marcela has leaned on her mother her whole life to cook for her while she just adds salt and the final touch. Babina, meanwhile, asks for only one thing, for her daughter to be happy and to succeed.

The reset. The pizza stays, because it's the only thing the place does well, so Martin calls his friend Vincenzo, a chef straight from Naples, to show them how to make proper dough and a correct sauce from peeled tomatoes. Vincenzo's message is clear: "Less is more," a good pizzeria only needs ten kinds of pizza made excellently, not twenty-four. Martin sends the exhausted parents off for a well-earned rest, brings in reinforcements from the gastro supplier, swaps the ancient cash register for a modern Dotykačka system, and replaces the ugly old billboard with a dignified identity. There's also a stormy confrontation when Marcela slips off with her team for a cigarette while nothing is cooked, and Martin tells her flat out that she finally has a chance to prove to her mother she can do it alone.

New concept & menu. Marcela decides to keep the pizza and add Italian dishes that Slovaks know and won't be put off by. Martin prepares a pork schnitzel breaded with parmesan, braised beef in the style of our goulash, a creamy garlic soup (zuppa di aglio), a bruschetta with roasted peppers and dried tomato, and a ricotta dessert. The pizzas are slimmed down to ten honest kinds, from margherita to quattro stagioni. The goal is for the Slovak customer to have no trouble with the new card.

The big night. The gala is a test under pressure. Before the start Marcela has cooked practically nothing and Martin has to push hard, but once service gets going the kitchen handles the first rush. The guests are delighted, one declares the pizza is "a hundred times better than the one I ate in Italy for seventeen years." For once something other than pizza comes out of the kitchen, and people are loving it. "I had goosebumps," admits Martin, who hadn't had such a positive evening in a long time. Marcela showed she can do it brilliantly.

One month later. A month on, Martin returns to find a full restaurant, freshly painted walls, a clad fireplace, and a generally cosier space. The daughter is said to have taken the place into her own hands, with babina now only supervising. The tomato soup, the bruschetta and the braised beef are all excellent, and the place has gained a soul. One black mark remains, though: the pizza card is still too wide and the old drinks list wasn't reprinted alongside the new menu, so the place still lacks a clear, precisely defined identity.

Verdict: 3 knives. Martin leaves satisfied, a full restaurant is proof to him that the food is excellent and people are enjoying it, and he rates the place 3 knives. The small black mark, the unfinished card and drinks list, keeps him from giving more, but the transformation is enough and Marcela showed she can do it even without her parents. (The episode recording cuts off a few seconds before the score is handed over; the 3-knife rating is per the show's database.)