Red Horse

The restaurant & setting. This time Martin finds himself in Brezno, beneath the statue of Martin Rázus, in a town where, as he puts it, „there aren't many culinary experiences to be had." The Red Horse restaurant sits in the former Mostáreň Brezno, a factory once famous around the world that then sat decaying for almost 30 years until the owner bought it and brought it back to life. It is part of his Double Red Cars sports-car museum, and its interior is literally packed with exhibits and scrap-art décor. The name is essentially a badge built from two carmakers: red is the symbolic colour of sports cars, and a horse adorns the logos of the two best automakers. The place has been open for about two and a half years.

The people. The owner is Marcel Kolenička, a car guy who fulfilled two dreams at once, the museum and the restaurant, though he admits gastronomy isn't a world he sees into well. His right hand is Terka (Tereza), who handles events and marketing and is something of an informal floor manager, and also Marcel's future sister-in-law. In the kitchen there's a single cook, Juraj (46), a trained mechanic who has nonetheless cooked for 25 years, passed through England, Prague and Italian cuisine, and says Red Horse is his last posting: for health reasons he wants to cook for only one more year. He's helped by Lenočka from Ukraine, and on the floor stands waitress Ivet (Ivetka), a former beautician whose biggest problem is that she doesn't smile.

Why they called Martin. The museum is thriving, but the restaurant pulls in bad reviews, and even Marcel admits he isn't 100% happy with how it runs. The core problem is that the whole kitchen runs on convenience food, everything frozen, shipped in, industrially prepped, while the floor service is lifeless. „Beneath the surface there's an unsmiling staff and dishes made from semi-prepared products," is the diagnosis before Martin even sits down.

The first visit. Martin orders blind (waitress Ivet comes without a notepad and half the dishes aren't available) and disaster arrives course after course. Venison-leg sirloin smells so bad he sends it back: „Oh hell, ugh. The meat stinks." The cheeks fall apart, the sauce is over-wined and sour, the papardelle has burnt garlic and is underseasoned, and both the fried cheese and the schnitzel are clearly from an industrially breaded convenience mix. The peak comes with a minced-meat blob: „This tasted, pardon me, like licking a washing machine's backside." Juraj himself lists everything that's convenience food when taking the order and adds: „I've cooked for 25 years and this is the first place where I cook from semi-prepared stuff."

The diagnosis. Martin names the root of the rot directly: „You make convenience food and you make it like slop for dogs." The owner spends money on overpriced frozen products instead of investing in the kitchen and the people, and Marcel takes it all without excuses: „I'm aware of everything, I agree with everything. I have nothing to say to that." The confrontation exposes a second wound: a single cook, lost girls on the floor, and a broken combi-oven whose repair the owner and cook twice failed to arrange out of a pure communication breakdown. Juraj openly admits the job doesn't satisfy him this way and he's only hanging on out of inertia. „This restaurant lacks a professional."

The reset. First comes the cleanup: even the scrap-art gets dusted. Martin launches a hiring drive for new waitresses and runs mock interviews with the candidates (among them seventeen-year-old Tymea from Brezno and a more experienced waitress just off maternity leave), showing Marcel how much more energy they sell than his own girls. Into the kitchen he brings a blast chiller, sous-vide and a vacuum sealer, and together with Juraj cooks honest beef cheeks, „real cheeks", demonstrating a system of prepping ahead, blast-chilling, and serving within 15 minutes. The kitchen is to be rebuilt to suit the cook, and Juraj gets 2,000 euros in Tesco vouchers to buy quality ingredients.

New concept & menu. No rebrand, Red Horse stays Red Horse, but Martin builds a full menu from starter to dessert. A Waldorf salad with chicken breast as a starter, a parsnip cream as the soup, a milanesa cutlet with parmesan, panko crumb and hasselback potatoes as the main draw, beef-ragú pasta, and chocolate brownie to finish. „It really often takes very little," Martin repeats. You don't need to change the whole philosophy, just lay a foundation and build on it.

The big night. For the evening Marcel rounds up 13 staff on shift for 60 guests, which Martin calls economic nonsense: „13 people doing what 5 could handle." The kitchen under Juraj holds: he got everything prepped, and the cheeks and cutlet wow the guests, „that meat is excellent, I couldn't even make this at home." The problem is the floor again: both new and old girls carry dishes to the wrong tables, starters vanish, one guest gets her dinner twice. Martin has to halt service for a moment and organise the whole thing: the girls listen to Juraj, he plates, they carry. „Don't screw it up right before the finish line."

One month later. A month on, Martin returns as „an inspection from the ministry of gastronomy." The biggest change: the waitresses have been swapped, the problem server from day one is gone, Dada stayed and some new part-timers arrived. Until May they've temporarily pulled in a young, capable cook from their other hotel, and convenience products have been cut by almost 90%. Not everything is perfect: the parsnip cream is lumpy, a chicken skewer arrives with rotten rocket and meat that looks raw (it turns out merely pink and sous-vided), and the burger has tough cartilage from the butcher. But the beef cheeks are „gastro-porn," the meat falls apart and the sauce is well balanced. Marcel concedes: „It met my expectation 100% that you'd help us."

Verdict: … 3 knives. Martin hands the rating to both, the boss and the cook, „by joint effort." The cheeks were the one dish that scored full marks; everything else always had some detail that wasn't quite 100%, but the place took a real step: it shed the convenience food and has the potential that the museum's setting deserves. 3 knives for a tangible move forward and an open road, but also because the work is far from finished.