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Ana Roš, the World's Best Female Chef, to cook at London's Westbury Hotel for CHEFstock
Ana Roš started cooking relatively late. “I was 30 years old and pregnant with my first child,” she says. Which makes it all the more improbable that the self-taught Slovenian would come to land the title of The World’s Best Female Chef. But after a decade of what she describes as “struggling with pans and knives, days and days of throwing things away, trying every single day to understand more,” the accolade is hers.
It was not exactly written in the stars: her father was a doctor and her mother a journalist from a family of diplomats. Roš, who speaks five languages, was studying to become a diplomat herself, until the day she swerved in a different direction entirely. After she met her husband, Valter Kramar, a Slovenian wine specialist and collector, the couple decided to take over his parents’ restaurant, Hiša Franko, in Slovenia’s remote Soča Valley - and resolved, before long, to shake things up.
“[We] were at a crossroads,” she says. “By this stage, Valter and I had been travelling and eating out all over the world, to elBulli, Le Calandre, Osteria Francescana, el Celler de Can Roca...We thought nothing of driving 500km or flying an hour and a half just for dinner. We could see that food was evolving but our kitchen team wasn’t ambitious enough to realise our new philosophy at Hiša Franko. There was a moment we looked at each other and said, 'OK, one of us needs to take over the kitchen'. After a short discussion, I agreed. So one bright day I entered the kitchen...”
Now 44, she arrives in London next week trailing clouds of glory after picking up the superlative award at this year’s World’s 50 Best in Melbourne. When she takes to the stoves for one night only at the Westbury Hotel’s annual CHEFstock festival in Mayfair on Wednesday, she will be, unofficially, the headline act.
That a female chef could be the hot ticket of a high profile series of £180-a-head dinners would have been unimaginable even a year ago. Not that it’s been easy. As a mother of two, Roš knows all about the struggles female chefs face in balancing the pressures of the kitchen with home life. But she remains optimistic about their ability to ‘have it all.’
“My American sous chef, one of the greatest chefs I’ve ever seen in my life, she’s 27 [and] she told me that when she finishes in Slovenia in a few years, she’ll probably quit and go back to school,” says Roš. “I was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ You can have both. You can organise your life. But you can’t say it’s the same for men and women because there’s always this conflict in us. With children at home, we can’t go for a beer after a long, stressful day. We run home and maybe do some laundry.”
Maybe it’s this, then, that lies behind her realistic prognosis for the likelihood of equality in her chosen workplace.
“The nature of the work is not going to change,” she says. “The percentage of women in the industry will always be smaller.” And of the self-selecting percentage that sticks it out, only a certain percentage again will be at the elite level. “The percentages start to get very small, but it is still a very real number,” she adds.
Roš, who skied competitively in her youth and nearly trained as a ballet dancer, makes it all look easy. She and her husband value their downtime. Roš takes her two children to school each day, eats with them every evening (pasta’s a favourite), and as a family, they take off two-and-a-half months each winter when the restaurant closes to go travelling.
She reels off a list of long-haul destinations: “Myanmar, Japan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Madagascar…” They’re also “addicted” to Cabo Verde, the mid-Atlantic volcanic archipelago they’ve visited upwards of a dozen times. “It’s a very particular place – it looks like the moon sometimes. But two, three weeks in a little wooden house on the beach without water, without electricity, barefoot, that is luxury.”
Closing each year was a question of economy at first because winter in the countryside is hard, she says. “But after we were on Netflix’s Chef’s Table [documentary series] last year, we sat down and asked, ‘Should we open? We’re packed every day’. We said no.”
She describes her cooking as a “patchwork” of influences, rooted in the unique terroir of the lush Soča Valley where Hişa Franko, a 19th Century farmhouse in which Ernest Hemingway is said to have recuperated from injury during the First World War is located. “Being self-taught has turned out to be an advantage. It makes your cuisine very unique. You’re not influenced by one-way thinking. You are more global.”
This is her favourite time of year, when the area’s gardens, meadows and forests are blooming and her “zero-kilometre” approach to sourcing finds its fullest expression.
“There’s a flow to the seasons,” she says. “I have my forager who is my eyes and ears. If he says, ‘Ana, we have maybe another week of morels’, I need to start thinking about something else. It makes you work.”
Roš’s “dream meal” is in season now: bitter field chicory simply dressed with brown beans, garlic and olive oil. She doesn’t do signature dishes – “A dish that was created even a year ago doesn’t have a lot to do with what we’re doing now.” Right now, her spring menu evokes the countryside around her: think Arctic char with Japanese knotweed, watercress, buttermilk and buckwheat, or walnut meringue, 21-day kefir, pear in camomile, forest honey and pollen ice cream.
Such hyperlocal ingredients may seem at odds with the extravagant haute cuisine that Roš’s international guests might find in London, Paris or New York, but they give visitors a deep connection with a forgotten landscape and a reason to stray from the standard European foodie itinerary. Now she’s been crowned the best female chef, they have one more reason.
There are, though, many who take issue with the very existence of such an anachronistic award: in the seven years since it was first handed to Anne-Sophie Pic, it has only once had a winner with a restaurant on the World’s 50 Best ‘proper’ list. (Hiša Franko made it to a creditable no.69 this year.) Roš, a no-nonsense sort, is not among the cynics.
“Whenever people say to me that I shouldn’t accept the award, I say ‘Why?’ We should be celebrating. It’s great not only for the restaurant but for the whole destination. I wasn’t euphoric – we didn’t drink champagne or party – but I’ll take the compliment. I’m pretty realistic about it: you wake up the next day and you have even more work to do.”
Ana Roš cooks at Alyn Williams’ 5th annual CHEFstock at the Westbury Hotel, London, on June 14, 2017. For reservations, call 020 7183 6426. alynwilliams.com