Ana Roš: "When I was a teenager I had an eating disorder. That's why I take maximum care of what I eat and cook"

Chef Ana Roš, pictured at Hiša Franko's door at the end of November 2022.ADAHLIA COLE

"I use meat as a spice, as an essence in the backgrounds, to support the flavor. The basis of my cooking is vegetable," says Ana Roš. This chef is the ambassador of Slovenian cuisine and has long challenged with green proposals the meat diets of the mountain, in the Alpine valley of Soča, where her restaurant Hiša Franko is located, with two Michelin stars and ranked 34th in The World's 50 Best list. Its Reincarnation menu, which can be harmonized with natural wines, kombuchas or juices, is delicious, tasty and without forcefulness.

"Diners tell me they enjoy it and don't feel full. I think the lightness of the tasting menus is necessary. I worry about how people are going to feel when they taste my dishes and digest them. I am very sensitive to this," says this 50-year-old self-taught professional who can express herself in seven languages and has reached the top of the gastronomic elite: she was chosen as the best chef in the world in 2017.

"My restaurant reflects the way I like to eat. When my daughter told me two years ago that she had decided to go vegan, my son replied 'Oh my god, now we're not going to eat meat at home.' I said, 'You've been eating vegetarian and you haven't noticed. Because I don't cook just meat at home, I make vegetables with just a little cheese or oil," he says.

Carrot kebab, with grapefruit and spices Panch Phoron (Bengali)Adahlia Cole

So Roš's crusade for green cooking is accompanied by twenty-somethings Eva Klara, who works in Hiša Franko's room, and Svit, a student at the Italian gastronomic university of Slow Food. They are the two children she had with Valter Kramar, her ex-husband and responsible for the Olympic athlete who was studying to be a diplomat discovering her love for cooking in the family hotel-restaurant Hiša Franko, which celebrates its 50th anniversary.

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Ana Roš, married again at the beginning of 2023, is a standard-bearer of the plant world even on the tablecloths and uniforms of Hiša Franko's team. Created together with the designer Matea Benedetti, they are made of organic cotton and feature floral motifs. The staff and herself move through the restaurant as in a choreography of fragments of the landscape that surrounds them.

Greenery also reaches its growing restaurant orbit. Roš is now hyperactive, quadrupling. He is teaming up for a restaurant in an enclave by the Adriatic in Istria. In Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, triumphs with its bakery Pekarna Ana based on sourdough breads and artisanal pastries with different cereals, fruits and nuts of the country. "Everything is Slovenian based," he boasts.

That local line, with a cosmopolitan and informal touch, is the axis of the spring menu that unfolds in Ana in Slon, a pop up or ephemeral restaurant in the center of Ljubljana while the works of what in summer will be a bistro are finished. "An informal space based on rural and farming life: local, seasonal and sustainable. I want it to be a place you always want to come back to," Roš says of the place, which will be called Ana. "Everything is Ana, like when my daughter called all her dolls Ana when she was little," says the cook, who has become a national icon.

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Ana Roš has energized Slovenian cuisine like a formula 1. In the last decade, the notoriety of the chefs of this country has grown. "I don't want to play the role of the princess of the kingdom," she says. "I'm humble, I've just worked hard for years and enjoy cooking. I recognize that I am very active, that I go on many adventures and I have a lot of media exposure. But in Slovenia there are many good professionals and new generations who are stomping. Cooks who follow an excellent path with their own gardens and even raise their animals, who make their bread, cheese, butter ... I think we're creating a very interesting community."

The Slovenian cook — whose alpine paradise made international traction in a Netflix documentary, Chef's Table — has more collective goals. It has already had the collaboration of producers from its Soča valley for years. He has an orchard, cows and trout that he collects in a pool connected to the stream that runs next to Hiša Franko. "My dream is to create a network of biodynamic producers in the region. We are making a map of abandoned gardens to recover them and I want to make a platform where cooks and customers and everyone can buy vegetables that know exactly where they come from. Why eat Chinese mushrooms planted here in a greenhouse when you can grow indigenous mushrooms? Why not produce enough vegetables to feed eight million people?"

Ice cube for cocktails. Adahlia Cole

Precisely because of this line of healthy nutrition that the cook follows, she has been hired in her country as a government advisor to develop eating plans, similar to the collaboration with chef José Andrés that Barack and Michelle Obama established in the White House. Green cooking, organic production and healthy lifestyle habits are a matter of state in Slovenia. "We want to be the most sustainable country in the world," proclaimed Prime Minister Robert Golob at the European Food Summit congress on responsible consumption, organized in Ljubljana at the end of last year by the country's most mediatic chef. There, an appeal to common sense, Common Sensitarian Diet Manifesto, was launched as a guide to good practices that permeates the global gastronomic culture. Scientists and doctors, as well as professionals from the culinary sector and the co-founders of the congress, have participated in its preparation, together with the chef of Hiša Franko, the gastronomic critic and creator of events such as Gelinaz Andrea Petrini and the specialist in nutrition and sustainable food Afton Halloran.

"My daughter, who is a vegetarian, is pushing me when it comes to making decisions," the Slovenian president told EL PAÍS. "It would be useful for other politicians from Europe and the world to sit down and discuss how to address sustainable production and consumption practices and with a real intention to improve food. We need less words and more action," says vehement the cook, ambassador of the United Nations World Tourism Organization for Gastronomy Tourism. It has also embarked on sustainability campaigns such as the Basque forum Bermeo Tuna Forum. "I am an advocate of any agreement that means protecting our seas. Everything possible must be done so that tuna is not overexploited," he says.

"Common sense in food for me is to maintain a nutritional balance and try to eat in a varied and healthy way," says Ana Roš. "We eat too much processed food and you have to use fresh food. When I was a teenager I had an eating disorder. That affected me a lot and that's why I take maximum care of what I eat and what I cook." And this is where the commitment to a diet based substantially on vegetables, fruits and legumes comes in. "I believe in healthy food and a vegetable diet, but you also have to take care of these vegetables, because if they are treated with chemicals we already have a problem. How to grow organically for millions of people? And how to encourage a plant-based diet in a country where the meat industry is very strong and consumers are carnivores? It's a problem. There are large lobbies with which it is difficult to change the situation from one day to the next, but I am optimistic, we must not give up and try to make good food, with fresh products, with a breadth of vegetables, fruits and vegetables, a political issue. Agricultural policy must be transformed and what the various regions can offer must be well managed. Change must be brought about. Chefs can influence the way we work, but large-scale initiatives are needed."

"We cooks are now like rock stars. But in addition to living fame we have to make a commitment: to be a platform to expose problems, not only in food and hospitality, but in people's daily lives. It's not a utopia to want to achieve a better world," says the hyperactive chef.

And the Ana Ros effect has also meant a sky of stars in Slovenian cuisine: ten restaurants with one and one with two (Hiša Franko). Michelin, which debuted in Slovenia in 2020 (the first red guide launched by the tire company after the pandemic) recognizes this country "as a unique gastronomic destination, offering multiple culinary experiences in excellent restaurants led by top chefs, who wisely combine traditions with modern techniques in a sustainable way." This factor, "the strong commitment to eco-responsible culinary experiences", has led to six restaurants awarded the Michelin green star.

And apart from Michelin awards, the country has its own green seal for catering establishments that demonstrate their commitment to organic cuisine and the use of local raw materials. Slovenia can boast of products such as salt, honey, olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, apples, kakis, cheeses and excellent natural wines.

"We are a very rural country. One of the greenest countries in the world, with little industry and an original agricultural activity, rooted in traditions, and I think what we can transmit is a green, ecological philosophy," insists Roš. "We can be an example for the world of sustainable thinking."