The unlikely story of the world's best female chef Ana Ros

Her restaurant ranks No 69 in the world, according to the World's 50 Best Restaurants organisation

Ana Roš is the most unlikely of chefs. She never wanted to be one and she never studied cooking. So how come she won the title of World’s Best Female Chef this year?

It’s quite a story. “I come from a society that doesn’t have a tradition of gastronomy, where cooking is not a prestigious job,” she says in an interview at her isolated restaurant Hiša Franko in a valley in western Slovenia. These days, diners make the journey from as far away as Australia, and you need to book months ahead. Roš never saw that coming.

As a teenager, she was a talented sportswoman: a keen skier at the national level. Later, she went on to study International Science and Diplomacy in Trieste, though her Italian was shaky. Still, she went on to be offered a job at the European Commission in Brussels, and it was only then that she finally made the decision to abandon her dream of a career in diplomacy and try the restaurant business instead.

She had fallen in love and her husband’s parents — the owners of Hiša Franko — had decided to retire. It was the year 2000. She and husband Valter — a sommelier — decided to take over the business. Valter loved food and together they started travelling around Europe, dining at some of the continent’s best restaurants.

There was just one problem: When they returned to Hiša Franko, they didn’t like the old-fashioned Slovenian food. 

“One day, my husband and I sat down and discussed that someone needs to take over the kitchen,” she says. “He said he didn’t have time, so I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I didn’t think twice. The first five years were a learning process. I was struggling: reading books and going to conferences and trying out things.”

The restaurant ranks No 69 in the world, according to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organisation, which presented her with the Best Female Chef accolade in Melbourne on April 5. The restaurant in the Soca Valley is a beautiful spot to dine. But it’s not somewhere you would expect a destination restaurant. Much of the recent international success is down to Netflix, which featured her in an episode of Chef’s Table in 2016. Roš doesn’t watch TV and had never heard of the show. “So when Netflix came out on May 27 last year, at first it was the same. But we didn’t realise the time difference meant it was morning in the States. By the evening, our reservations system had broken down and visits to our web page went from 200 to 10,000 a day.”

The Best Female Chef followed. It’s a controversial award in the sense that critics say it is ridiculous to have a separate category for a female chef. So what does Roš say to that?

“The best chefs in this world — look at Massimo Bottura, look at Rene Redzepi —they have great wives. They are 100 per cent on their work because it’s taken care of, their children, their private life. They come home, probably somebody even cooks for them and has time to chat to them.

“Do you think that happens to a woman?”