Veganaf

The restaurant & setting. Martin headed to Banská Bystrica, a town of 73,000 people with five vegan restaurants, to one of them, called Veganaf. The place sits in the very heart of the city, right next to the SNP Museum, below the memorial, a textbook location. It has been open roughly a year and a half, since mid-2023. The reality, though, is the opposite of that location: "This place is completely dead, because nobody comes here," says the owner himself, joking that he's "opened a plant-based bistro in a meat-eaters' valley."

The people. The owner is Peter (Peťo), a vegan who founded the restaurant with a vision of bringing the people of Bystrica healthy plant-based food free of animal suffering: "we don't eat meat, eggs, dairy or fish." Two young people work the kitchen: Lukáš Berák (19), a former hockey player who returned from America after an injury, had to change his whole life and "ended up in a kitchen"; and Valentína (Val, 20), a Bystrica native fresh out of grammar school, an untrained cook for whom cooking is a hobby and who has eaten plant-based for over 6 years (her whole family is vegetarian). The floor is carried by waitress Daniela (Danielka). The restaurant was made possible by a "non-returnable loan" from Peter's parents, who run the successful Koliba u sv. Krištofa.

Why they called Martin. The biggest problem is simple and brutal: a lack of customers. "Today's takings are 9 euros." At lunch one or two people sit in the place, and even they often order just a soup. A month after opening Peter was already in the red, and a year and a half on he is half a year from the end. "My business isn't doing well at all."

The first visit. Martin ordered across the menu and a gallery of plant-based disappointments opened up. The Parisian salad rested on seitan that "tasted like rubber", extremely watery and over-oniony. The hot-and-sour soup was neither sour nor hot, just tasteless water. The curry passed as the one decent dish, "if it were finished off a little." The ramen, cooked the day before, was "water, people, all on one note, nothing." The kettle goulash "smells like tomatoes" and tastes like tomato soup: "calling something a kettle goulash when I can't taste anything in it takes real nerve." And the cheese burger, a soggy bun drowned in a yellow mass, earned its own culinary term: "gastro-mud." Martin added it up: an empty restaurant at one o'clock, "resigned and even cold."

The diagnosis. Martin named the root cause bluntly: Peter had "mixed up two different things: the gastro business and charity work." He turned his restaurant into animal-rescue advocacy, with quotes on the walls like "eat your food as medicine", and pushes people away with his agenda. The staff are "kids to make up the numbers", who have cooked the ramen the same way for years because "that's how Peťo wants it", and never tried to lift it higher. A silent killer. You can't run a business cooking for the 50 vegans Peter knows in town, you have to reach meat-eaters too. Yet Peter rejects the idea of selling meat as "a moral low." Meanwhile Martin visited Peter's father at his successful koliba, where the economics work, unlike at Veganaf, and the father admits he honestly pities his son and sees him resigned.

The reset. Since people won't come to the restaurant, Martin flipped the direction: go to the people. Over the phone he arranged tasting deliveries: a beetroot cream and vegetable lasagne to a kindergarten, a dill stew with chickpea patties to a retirement home. He taught the team to season food "to the ceiling" ("add more salt and it'll be salty") and to push the pace, because an unreliable supplier is finished. He added colourful flyers and colouring sheets for children. As a financial boost, Tesco donated €2,000 in shopping vouchers, help they were "incredibly grateful" for, given that a weekly take used to be around €1,000.

New concept & menu. No rename, but a clear shift in spirit. Martin filled the restaurant with live flowers, even live little trees of stabilised moss, and ("I took the liberty, Peťo, of wiping that board of yours with the quotes") erased the preachy slogans so a guest could eat in peace without guilt. "Live and let live." Then meat-eater Martin cooked a plant-based menu meant to please the whole range of people: shimeji tempura with peanut dressing, a layered mushroom ragout with potato mash ("you get the whole palette of flavours in your mouth"), a beluga lentil stew with basil pesto and Jerusalem artichoke, fried cauliflower in celeriac purée. "This is how I picture vegan food."

The big night. For the first time since the staff have worked here, the restaurant was full. But the excitement hit the reality of the kitchen: after cooking, the team sat over coffee for an hour and a half instead of prepping, Valentína blitzed the potato mash with a stick blender into glue, and used it anyway. Guests waited up to two and a half hours, "hungry since five", finished their starters and waited another 30 minutes for the mains. Martin gave the service a harsh verdict ("a kinder kitchen") and Peter himself admitted: "I told you, I knew how it would look." In the end they pulled it off, people enjoyed the food, some even ordered seconds, and Daniela knew how to sell it.

One month later. A month on, Martin returned and this time brought hope. Veganaf had launched delivery, roughly 40 portions a day, firms approached, today's run went to a car plant near Zvolen. The new soup of red baked cabbage, which Martin had left behind, became so popular that it replaced the original beetroot cream, and the mushroom ragout is a hit. The white-bean salad was pretty and playful, only slightly under-salted. The tiramisu, though, disappointed: no coffee flavour, a brownie at the bottom, "this I don't like." It still holds that the dishes lack "that final touch to make them tip-top", and Peter honestly hopes that after the broadcast the numbers will come that keep him in Bystrica.

Verdict: Martin acknowledged the place had taken a step forward, the cabbage soup tasted "exactly the way I picture it", and awarded Veganaf 3 knives, noting the flavours still need that last finishing step. Valentína nailed the guess: "I was hoping for, well, three." "Wow, three." Meat-eater Martin promised to root for the vegan place and called on the people of Bystrica to come eat at Veganaf and keep Peter in town.