Reštaurácia u Katky

The restaurant & setting. For the season four finale Martin arrives in Košice, Slovakia's second-largest city, in the Ťahanovce housing estate, one of the youngest in the city, completed in the nineties. There he finds Reštaurácia u Katky, already 23 years in business. The place openly embraces retro, „in essence we're a bit retro, but we want to keep it that way, because we like it". It serves a daily menu, an evening menu and above all family events, weddings, wakes and celebrations. On the day of Martin's visit they happen to be hosting a wake. The interior and kitchen feel frozen in the nineties, which the owner sees as pretty and well kept, but Martin senses the problem at once.

The people. The restaurant is run by owner Aďa (Adriana) Šeriščanová, 50, who opened it at 27 and by her own account is here „the owner, the cleaner, the barmaid and of course the waitress". The service is handled by waitress Janka, „an old classic". The kitchen is a team of experienced women who learned to cook back in the seventies, and among them a young head chef, Paťo, 33, who came from another venue and into whom management placed its trust to bring order to the kitchen. He is helped by a former apprentice, Maťo, and a current apprentice, Peťo, so the generations are slowly passing the baton.

Why they called Martin. The Ťahanovce estate is home to 25,000 people, yet the restaurant stands nearly empty by day and Aďa keeps the place afloat mainly on events, while the evenings stay quiet. Aďa pours energy, time and money into the place, but the effect never comes. Martin hunts for the one problem holding everything back, and quickly finds that the kitchen is trying to cook „modern" because it is the trend, even though it has neither the technique nor the habits for it. „That today turned out the way it turned out," Aďa names her disappointment.

The first visit. Martin sits down to the daily menu, which offers up to seven dishes for the single occupied table, and orders across the whole list. The service is slow, more than twenty minutes for the food, „I could have brought a book and finished it". The chicken ragout with gnocchi has a soupy, watery consistency, „this ragout has the structure of a soup". The potato pancake under a spicy pork sauté is rubbery and undercooked. The „meat of two colours" turns out to be two indistinguishably grey pieces, „grey and grey-grey, spot ten differences". The chicken breast with broccoli-blue-cheese sauce runs with melted cheese, „it's as if I were eating melted blue cheese on its own", and the mixed vegetables have no taste. „The only good thing here is the halušky," Martin sums up, the one dish that doesn't fail being the cabbage salad.

The diagnosis. Martin names the root cause bluntly: the kitchen cooks without love and without honesty, has terrible work methods and habits, and serves essentially „hospital food". The à la carte menu hasn't changed in at least seven years, and even in the month Paťo has been head chef nothing new was prepared. Martin also confronts the grime in the kitchen, the old wooden furniture and the lack of order, „a kitchen has to be clean, that's the alpha and omega". The main diagnosis, though, is about the people: the older cooks are stuck in the past, and the young head chef, who „learned it wrong and has done it that way ever since", lacks the strength to tell them how it should be done. Aďa agrees with Martin, „I'm glad we see it the same way".

The reset. Rather than a rebrand, Martin decides to lean into the very nostalgia the place breathes, „we should use this atmosphere and take that nostalgia". First he takes the whole team to a Košice cooking school, where he gives each of them a bag of ingredients and has them make a dumpling, to see whether they can cook at all. All three versions are fine, „you can cook, so what I saw yesterday didn't happen". The kitchen gains professional stainless cabinets and a fridge from his friend Miro at Gastrokuchyne, the place gets a €2,000 Tesco voucher, a new scale and a mixer. Martin has retro plates and cups made specially for Reštaurácia u Katky, inspired by his childhood and old canteen dining, „a proper Hotel Kiev 2025 feel".

New concept & menu. The concept stays, honest traditional and retro dishes, just done properly. Martin prepares a tasting menu from his own memories: a French soup with mussels made honestly from minced meat, not from a packet, stuffed pepper with a homemade dumpling, and Bratislava-style pork shoulder with tarhoňa and both cucumber and cabbage salads. Alongside it come retro starters, a horseradish roll in aspic and eggs filled with blue-cheese foam topped with caviar, and for dessert a quark-and-apple žemľovka and strawberries with whipped cream. „There's no retro without French soup," he explains. New retro drinks arrive too, in orange, raspberry, cola and kiwi flavours.

The big night. Martin lets the team cook their own way, but lays down rules, phones away and the kitchen running on command. Aďa is to manage everything as the owner, Paťo to take charge of the kitchen as head chef. A problem in the floor service shows up immediately, the waitresses open drinks before the guests have ordered, „you've just thrown €60 in the bin". Under stress the system collapses, starters, soups and mains get mixed up and sent to the wrong tables, „we agreed on a system, the system has to work". Despite the chaos on the floor, the kitchen pulls everything off and the guests praise it, above all the French soup, „it had a taste I hadn't felt in a long, long time". Martin is genuinely moved, „you really made my day today".

One month later. A month on, Martin returns to Reštaurácia u Katky and the place is running at full tilt, the phone ringing as people book spots for events, the regulars having taken to the retro concept. From the daily menu Martin picks his favourites, both the goulash and the French soup, the stuffed pepper, the Bratislava pork shoulder and the žemľovka. The goulash is honest and thick, if a touch under-salted, the stuffed pepper excellent, and the bacon-larded Bratislava shoulder very good. Weaker is the chicken Diana, stuffed with rather raw potato mash, „I just don't quite buy this combination anymore". The major nonsense from the first visit is gone, „compared with the nonsense I ate here the first time, this was something entirely different".

Verdict: Martin appreciates that the team grasped the essential thing, the kitchen returned to the honest retro that suits it, and the nonsense was replaced by dishes with a head and a heart. They already have the product, now it is up to them to make themselves known to the wider public and to work on the retro look and on the details of the atmosphere. „I hope people find their way back to you, to bring them joy with food the way you did for me today," he signs off in the season four finale. 4 knives.