Michalis Michaelides
I certainly don’t have the luxury of traveling for food—choosing my trips around restaurants I want to visit or making the discovery of local dishes and flavors the main reason for going. Still, whenever I travel, I try to book at least one restaurant to sample during my stay.
Recently, watching the episode featuring Ana Ros in Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” I felt an overwhelming urge to visit Slovenia—specifically the Soca Valley, home to her restaurant, Hisa Franko. In a fairytale Alpine landscape, which, if I’m not mistaken, ranks among the greenest on the planet, the Slovenian chef and her sommelier husband transformed the family business belonging to Valter’s parents into a restaurant of international standing. Today, it holds three Michelin stars, as well as a Michelin Green Star for sustainability.
Drawing on wild herbs, local cheeses, fish from the river, and ingredients supplied by the valley’s foragers and producers, she has created a cuisine inseparable from its surroundings. She has given her country’s local cuisine an identity it perhaps lacked before. She has created “Ana’s cuisine,” as she put it during our interview shortly before dinner at The Polo in Limassol, where she joined fellow Michelin-starred chef Pavlos Kyriakis for a dinner they prepared together.
So yes, watching her Netflix episode made me desperately want to go there. For everything she has achieved, for her unquestionably distinctive dishes, for the wines Valter chooses from the cellar—and for what she said about the power of love.
“Love plays a vital role in our lives,” she says in the opening of “Chef’s Table.” “Without love, it is difficult to function as we should. In the kitchen, this is incredibly important. When someone feels loved, they create much better things. They have more passion. Their thoughts are more beautiful. Love allows us to do beautiful things, and because of love, we sometimes cause destruction.”
You can find that love and passion in her dishes. Take the canapés prepared for us at the start of dinner, particularly the one with celeriac, pumpkin seeds, and an assortment of wild greens and herbs gathered by their forager. It felt as though the entire valley was contained in a single bite. There was an explosion of flavor in my mouth, unlike anything I had experienced in something so small. The imaginatively named Late Summer Harvest salad, the prawns, the artichoke, and the other dishes we enjoyed throughout the evening were equally bold and intense.
I grew up in a family where my grandparents always made sure that whatever nature produced found its way to our table, bringing out its qualities and enriching our food with it. From an early age, I learned to appreciate wild greens, herbs, spices, wild fruits, shoots, and everything else the earth so generously offers us. I also came to understand how essential these ingredients are to creating depth of flavor.
I have often wondered, for example, how different three familiar Cypriot meze dishes would taste without coriander. Imagine cracked olives, afelia, or potatoes tossed in the pan without that simple spice, so rich in aroma and intensity.
Acclaimed chefs such as Ana Roš have not simply incorporated these ingredients into their everyday cooking. They have made them an essential part of developing their craft and creating a personal identity within what we call fine dining.
We are fortunate that restaurants and hotels in Cyprus host Michelin-starred chefs of international standing. They give us the chance to travel, in our minds and through their food, to places around the world—until we can finally make the journey ourselves.
