Silvanus

The restaurant & setting. This time Martin heads to Kremnica, one of the oldest mining towns in Slovakia, where gold and silver have been mined since the tenth century and where the famous mint still stands. Right in the centre, on the main square, sits the game-focused hunting restaurant Silvanus, which has been open for almost fourteen years. The location is excellent and the venison dishes are honest, but the business is stuck in poor financial shape and the interior looks neglected, with damp, mouldy walls.

The people. The owner is Michal, whom everyone calls Mišo, a forty-three-year-old passionate cook and stubborn workaholic who is in the restaurant six or seven days a week. By his side is his son Filip, a twenty-three-year-old waiter who also handles marketing and operations and who called Martin in. The chef Peťo has been cooking here for twelve years, and the place is also staffed by Mišo's seventeen-year-old daughter Ela, known as Elinka, waitresses Lucia and Kristýna (called Kika), kitchen helper Viktória, and a grandmother who bakes the cakes.

Why they called Martin. The core problem is the broken communication between father and son and the chaotic management. Mišo insists on writing a brand-new daily menu every morning, so the kitchen has to invent around fifteen dishes a day, which adds up to over four hundred and fifty dishes a month. Filip wants a stable à la carte menu plus a few daily specials, but his father refuses to listen and does everything his own way. On top of that, Mišo burned out during covid and cannot restart himself, while debts and high energy bills keep piling up.

The first visit. Martin tries the strong venison broth, chicken hearts, a venison burger, deer ragout, and roasted wild boar. The food is honest and well balanced, clearly made by someone who cooks from the heart, but the service is pure comedy. The staff bring his food in white gloves and claim the plate is hot when it is completely lukewarm, and the whole thing feels like theatre to Martin. „Ten najväčší paradox tejto reštaurácie je to, že tu majú zatečené steny, ale nosia mi jedlo v bielych rukavičkách," he says, summing up the gap between the good food and the dismal surroundings.

The diagnosis. Martin names the root of the problem outright when they invite him into the kitchen. The walls are black and charred, the plaster is peeling and falling off, the extraction does not work, and Martin calls it the second-worst kitchen he has seen on the project. The real bomb, however, waits in the storerooms, eleven full fridges, sixty kilos of chicken breasts, mountains of pasta, wine for two or three years, and roughly eight thousand euros of food. „Ty si škrečok," Martin erupts, calculating that if Mišo had bought half as much, he could have repainted the walls long ago.

The reset. Martin convinces Mišo to pile the entire storeroom into one heap, and the owner finally sees eight thousand euros lying on the floor with his own eyes. He sends father and son off to a hockey match so they can sit down man to man, and meanwhile he tackles the restaurant himself. With his friend Dodo from the M-Plan company he fixes the ventilation, throws the glass wool out of the wretched kitchen, and has the whole space repainted, brightened, and cleaned. The once musty venue suddenly becomes a clean, bright restaurant.

New concept & menu. There is no big rebrand, just a return to honest hunters' cuisine with a sensible menu. Martin prepares a menu made entirely from game, jagerek as an offal ragout, fallow-deer ragout, venison steak with sweet-potato purée, a game soup, and a strong pheasant broth. He also adds a piece of local heritage, since a neighbour named Maťo revived a forgotten sweet called Kremnica krumple, whose story reaches back to the Jatkári family, and Martin brings it onto the restaurant's menu as a dessert.

The big night. Just before opening, the dining room is still unfinished, the tables unset, and the urinals full of standing water, but Filip handles it. When the guests arrive, the evening gets going and the team finally pulls together. From the kitchen, which used to be silent, laughter and good spirits suddenly break out after the first compliments from the floor. The guests are thrilled, the plates come back empty, and one of them gives the strudel ten out of ten. „Som dneska na vás veľmi hrdý," Martin says, and hands Mišo a joking gift.

One month later. A month later Martin returns to Kremnica in sunny weather and finds order, tidy spaces, and a working fountain. The restaurant has switched to a new format, four daily dishes plus a weekly special and a small à la carte menu of game dishes, and Mišo's unnecessary freezers are gone. The soup and the roe-deer schnitzel are excellent, but there are small shortcomings, a missing steak knife and two desserts, a blueberry lattice tart and a strudel, that are overbaked and dry.

Verdict: 4 knives. Martin awards Silvanus 4 knives. The team made incredible progress in a month, learned from its mistakes, and took a big step forward, and although the return visit revealed a few small slips, mainly in the desserts, Martin believes they will learn from them. He leaves feeling that every visitor to Kremnica should also drop into this restaurant, because it is definitely worth it.