Friends once “escaped” from her cooking. Now she is one of the world’s top chefs.

‘Transforming Spaces’ is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.

When Ana Ros became the head chef of Hisa Franko, a restaurant in the Slovenian countryside, she had no professional experience in cooking or running a restaurant. She had never trained as a chef and had never dreamed of becoming a chef since she was a little girl. In college, her friends “escaped” when it was her turn to cook communal meals, she said, because they didn’t like her food.

Fast forward 20 years and she is now one of the world’s most celebrated chefs, earning her international restaurant awards and putting Slovenia, a small country in Central Europe, on the map as a culinary hot spot.

The world of fine dining is still a boys’ club: About 6 percent of Michelin-starred restaurants are run by women, according to a 2022 analysis of Chef’s pencilan online publication about cooking and the restaurant world.

When she took the job in 2002, she was 30 and pregnant. Her partner at the time, Valter Kramar, had inherited the humble family restaurant from his parents two years earlier. “I went into the small kitchen, closed the door, leaned against the wall and thought, ‘Ana, what did you just do?'” Ms Ros said.

Today, Hisa Franko employs 45 people and has two Michelin stars and a place like one of the The 50 best restaurants in the world on an annual list by William Reed, a British media company. The company awarded Ms Ros the Best Female Chef award in 2017.

“Ana combines an international outlook with hyper-local sourcing,” William Drew, the content director for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, wrote in an email. He added that because Mrs. Ros is self-taught, “her dishes don’t feel the need to follow preconceived rules, but are designed to best showcase the ingredients and specialties of her homeland.”

Hisa Franko is located in the Soca Valley, a remote mountainous area named after the Emerald green river flowing through it. Close to Slovenia’s borders with Italy and Austria, it is known for its lush greenery and pristine waters.

In her first days on the job, Ms. Ros dreamed of transforming Hisa Franko into a travel destination. She wanted people from surrounding towns to visit to taste local ingredients and intense flavours.

She had no skills to execute her vision at the time, but had natural instincts. “As a painter sees colors, I see flavors,” she said. Ms. Ros is now known for applying world-class techniques to local ingredients: trout from the Soca River, cheese aged in the cellar, porcini mushrooms from the forest nearby. She doesn’t do signature dishes; everything is seasonal.

She opened last year Pekarna Anainto a bakery Ljubljanathe capital of Slovenia, and in February she opened a pop-up bistro in that city called Ana in Slon. The bistro’s first permanent branch will open in Ljubljana this fall.

Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob, who has known Ms Ros since 2012, considers himself a fan. “Hisa Franko is an ambassador of our country as a culinary destination,” he wrote in an email.

But in her career, Ms. Ros described being extra scrutinized because of her gender. People in the industry have often called her a “marketing story,” she said, assuming she didn’t have the talent to justify her success. During visits to her restaurant, where a multi-course tasting menu costs 255 euros ($280), colleagues were sometimes surprised by the quality of the food. “Why are you surprised?” she said. “Of course they think Hisa Franko is where it is, and I am where I am, because I am a woman.”

Mrs. Ros took a detour to the kitchen. Growing up in the 1980s in Tolmin, a short drive from Hisa Franko, she was a competitive skier in the Yugoslav national youth team from about age 10 to 17. She was also once a dancer and was a diligent student. After an injury, she decided to forgo her athletic career and study international relations at the University of Trieste in Italy, with plans to become a diplomat. She speaks seven languages, including Italian, English and French.

“How do you turn yourself from someone who isn’t a cook to someone who defines your national cuisine?” asked Brian McGinn, executive producer of “Chef’s Table,” a Netflix series in which each episode explores the life and work of one chef around the world. The show featured Mrs. Ros in its second season in 2016. be able to.”

Mr McGinn described Ms Ros’s style as ‘avant-garde’. Consider some dishes on the 2022 menu: carrot kebab with grapefruit; barley with pork broth and rose water; and beef tongue with seaweed crystal.

To educate herself, Ms. Ros researched ingredients and cooking techniques, attended food conferences, and experimented with recipe development in the early years after she started her job. “I was cooking from morning to night and at night I went to the books to understand what went wrong,” she said. She and Mr. Kramar visited restaurants around the world for inspiration.

As the years passed, she helped popularize Slovenian cuisine. She was invited to conferences and events with well-known colleagues, such as the chefs René Redzepi van Noma in Copenhagen, and Eric Ripert, van Le Bernardine in New York City. But when Netflix invited her to “Chef’s Table,” few guests visited during the week or in winter, and Hisa Franko was still relatively unknown outside Slovenia.

Then the episode premiered. “It broke our booking system,” Ms Ros said. “It actually ruined our lives. We weren’t ready.” Within a few days, Hisa Franko was booked for the year.

She continued her labor-intensive work at the restaurant — “I was still peeling potatoes and baking bread,” she said — as she fielded interview requests and was publicly recognized on the streets of Melbourne, San Francisco and New York . The sudden influx of patrons, along with the newfound fame, overwhelmed her. She and Mr. Kramar separated in late 2017. (They still co-own the restaurant; Ms. Ros married Urban Stojan, a project manager at an energy company, on New Year’s Eve in 2022.)

“I collapsed,” she said. “I had to completely reset how I worked.” She hired more staff (and started yoga) and had her life back together in the fall of 2018. “Today I can have my people bake at the bakery, I can cook at home, I can do my television appearance,” said. “I can go about my normal day-to-day life without having so much trouble.”

Ms. Ros lives in the Soca Valley, where seasonal tourism boosts the local restaurant business. She said that before she appeared on “Chef’s Table,” guests tended to expect dishes like pizza, schnitzel and spaghetti with clams. “We ate coffee paste with trout instead,” Ms. Ros said. When she first started experimenting with unusual dishes, she said, many diners left as soon as they saw the menu. But in the end, unexpected combinations won her acclaim.

“She would come in and say, ‘I was dreaming yesterday — let’s put this and this together,'” said Natasha Djuric, who was the former head baker at Pekarna Ana, Ms Ros’s bakery branch, and who also worked at Hisa Franko for three years, to 2022. “She feels the dishes on an energetic level.”

Today, nearly every ingredient the kitchen uses comes from within a 50-kilometer (about 30-mile) radius, and there are several dozen people in Hisa Franko’s supply chain, Ms Ros said, including herders, collectors, fishermen and a duo who are New Zealanders. Zeeland spinach is grown. , Mexican tarragon and more on a mountaintop biodynamic farm.

This network of restaurant workers and local producers faced major challenges during the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020. Farmers struggling to sell their produce as restaurants and cafes closed called Ms. Ros. “We have thousands of lambs that we can’t sell, tens of thousands of gallons of milk that we’re going to throw away,” Ms Ros recalled them saying.

Hisa Franko was closed and staff unable to leave the country due to lockdown restrictions. The restaurant team used the farmers’ ingredients to produce packaged foods for sale in supermarkets. “We’d come up with a creative recipe, like ricotta gnocchi with roasted poppy seeds and tarragon,” Ms. Ros said. Then her team scaled the recipe until it “tasted like a grandma made it for 10 people, but for 10,000 servings.”

Ms. Ros found a partner in Tus, a supermarket chain in Slovenia, and the first products hit the shelves in October 2020. The line today includes dozens of items, including apple strudel sorbet, steak tartare, candied cherry tomatoes in oil, and noodles with juniper berries.

As she reflects on her career, Ms. Ros is reminded of a meal she cooked in Northern Poland in 2012 for Cook It Raw, an invitation-only event where chefs learn about food traditions and techniques in a specific region of the world. Her cohort consisted of Mr. Redzepi and Albert Adria, a famous one restorer in Barcelona and the brother of Ferran Adria. (The siblings are known for the now closed El Bulli.)

The event “went completely wrong,” Ms Ros said. She missed her flight and arrived late. When the group went canoeing, her ship capsized. A dog bit her finger and she needed stitches. And when she was preparing the last meal, a bee stung her and she had an allergic reaction. “Everyone was like, ‘Look at Bridget Jones,'” she said. “Everything goes wrong. The girl doesn’t belong here.’”

In the end, she dragged the guests and other cooks with her her meal of beets, pine-smoked apples and fish foam. She said the moment showed her that the pressure to perform can affect every interaction for women in the industry, and that one moment can make or break a reputation. “We don’t get enough chances,” she said.

But she doesn’t let assumptions about her get under her skin, she said. “Staying true to yourself is sometimes very painful, but it pays off,” she said, adding: “I always think there is a better way to cook or a better flavor combination, and in the end, this is the only thing that gives satisfaction All the rest comes and goes.”