Staré časy

The restaurant & setting. This time Martin heads to the lovely village of Marianka just outside Bratislava, to a restaurant called Staré časy ("The Old Days"). The name is meant to evoke cosy nostalgia, the place has been open for over a year and a half and sits in a semi-idyllic spot on the edge of town, with horses kept right next door. But the first impression is grim: a shabby poster by the entrance, mess, cobwebs, mould and a strange toilet smell right at the door. „I felt like I was at someone's cabin. But a cabin nobody invited you to," read the text Martin got from his secret-scouting colleagues.

The people. The place is run by two waiters who fulfilled a dream and opened their own restaurant: Katka (Katarína), the roughly twenty-five-year-old owner with a hotel-school background, and the much older Mirko (Miro), a lathe operator by trade who has spent forty years in hospitality. Both borrowed money for the venture, each sinking around twenty thousand euros into it. In the kitchen they have head chef Ivan, a Bratislava native well-travelled in Spain whom Mirko pulled in from Prague, and above all babka Mária Damajková, the eighty-three-year-old soul of the place. „I get bored at home, so I love coming here to be among people," says babka, whom everyone adores.

Why they called Martin. The restaurant is sinking financially. It is a matter of a few months before they will have to close if it carries on like this, and the money they invested has so far returned nothing. „Someone has cursed us, some witch," Katka jokes, but Martin quickly sees the problem is not a curse but resignation and the fact that the owners have stopped working on themselves.

The first visit. Right at the table there is a sticky surface, a smeared glass and flies hovering over the food. The chicken soup is „extremely greasy" with an odd aftertaste, the 12.90-euro sandwich is soggy to the point of being rubbery because the bread soaked up all the juices. The crowning horror is an open septic tank behind the building, the source of both the stench and the flies. „You charge twenty-seven euros for a steak and you eat it with four flies," Martin marvels, and he never even tastes the steak. In the kitchen he finds ants, a filthy stove, a greasy extractor hood and bread a fly had already landed on four times. Disgusted, he leaves: „I'm out, I'm going to be sick."

The diagnosis. Martin's verdict is harsh: communication at freezing point and owners who that day did nothing for their own business, choosing instead to sit outside with coffee and a cigarette. What stings him most is that instead of self-reflection, Katka and her crew laugh off the whole situation and crack jokes about cutlery. „The lady owner is still keen on joking around. Enough, that's it." The emotional turning point comes the next day, when both owners admit the truth, scrub the kitchen with steel wool until midnight and Mirko breaks down in tears talking about the looming bankruptcy.

The reset. After the overnight clean-up comes the turnaround. Martin sends Ivan to show what he is made of, and the chef brings a simple yet excellent sandwich with roasted sirloin that wins everyone over. Martin's friends from gastrokuchyne.sk donate new pans, pots, a mixer, a vacuum sealer and a sous-vide, because the old pans „were unwatchable, like something from the last century". A cosy display cabinet for coats appears at the entrance so guests feel welcome straight away. And Mirko gets a clear message: no more sexy shorts and crude jokes with friends in front of other guests, he needs to grasp the idea of decorum.

New concept & menu. No grand rebrand, Staré časy should evoke the old days, just done honestly and cleanly. Martin teaches the team his favourite dish, a rolled roast of young pork belly with cabbage and potato dumplings, and pushes them towards a cheap input and an expensive output: tripe, trotters, pork knuckle, segedin goulash, Spanish birds. Ivan adds classics in a new guise, a game soup, marrow bone with toast, chicken supreme and potato dumplings filled with plums. „Cheap in, plenty of love, expensive out," is the new recipe.

The big night. The gala dinner shows the restaurant's two faces. The food delights the guests, the mains and the soup are excellent, but the service falls apart completely. A marrow bone goes out raw and a guest sends it back twice, pork tenderloins land on the wrong tables, nobody knows how many dishes have gone out, guests wait over three hours. „The right hand doesn't know what the left is doing," Martin sighs. The food won, the system lost across the board. „Today you fell flat on your face, it happens in this business."

One month later. A month on, Martin returns to Marianka and first sends in Aťka to scout, showing him the dining room over a video call. The picture is completely different: the tables are set, the glasses clean, the flies all but gone, and Mirko has come out of the kitchen in chef's whites, neatly dressed, serving a guest professionally without shorts or pushiness. Martin orders stuffed cabbage rolls, a potato stew and the plum dumplings, and finds himself transported back to childhood over them. „Compared with my last visit, the food is in a completely different place."

Verdict: Martin admits he spent a long time weighing up whether to give the sticker at all, but in the end the team earned its turnaround. „Honestly, I think you have earned this sticker, with these three knives." He adds that had his first impression been better, it could even have been four, because the food brought him real joy that day. Staré časy finish with a rating of 3 knives.