Twice a year, both in the spring and one week in the Autumn restaurants around Slovenia create a special menu for a special price during Restaurant Week. The restaurant shares their story through at least three seasonal courses. Farm to table, Michelin Star and exciting original restaurants will delight their guests with dedicatory dishes.
It’s easy to choose restaurants based on the region, how many hearts, or based on type of cuisine they focus on. Once filtering your preference on their website a list of restaurants will be displayed with an area to make a reservation, reservations are mandatory and get booked up fast. Choose the day, time and number of guests, be sure to leave a note with any additional specifics, for me I always ask in the note for a dog friendly area of the restaurant- this is easy in Slovenia because many restaurants are dog friendly. The restaurant will e mail confirmation of the reservation and you’re reserved for a food adventure. There is no cap on number of restaurants to try during this week. As long as a restaurant is participating you may explore them all.
The restaurants selected to participate in Restaurant Week Slovenia are restaurants that have been rated and chosen by food critic Uroš Mencinger on the Šola okusov (School of Flavors), they are selected based on creativity, quality, price and youth. I was surprised to see that service is not listed as a value, but youth… age of chef, the young at heart for the purpose of and concern for young people as future customers.
Restaurant weeks starts on a Friday and continues to the following Sunday for a total of ten days and nights. Lunch and dinner can be reserved in advance, but the exact dates and availability to reserve is only available two weeks before the event begins. Each restaurant has their own criteria, but the event has a cap of six people per reservation. Average restaurants offer a price of 19 Euro per person while the higher rated restaurants (3 hearts or more) offer their menus for 25 Euro per person.
I had plans for three of the restaurants, two in Ljubljana and one in Maribor, but due to the virus we only made it to the Maribor option. The restaurant has a cute play on its name which is Sedem, or Seven- same meaning. It’s a student restaurant where post high school students come to learn all about the restaurant industry before embarking on their careers in a full-time position within the industry, they come to Sedem to learn the art of fine dining. It’s a charming restaurant with a lovely outside terrace and fantastic food. They use a farm to table approach with fine dining and interesting modern touches. I enjoyed it all except, thirty minutes between courses was far too long. We added the wine pairing and the dessert to the 19 Euro menu for a total of 36 Euro per person. Each course was served pleasantly with a glass of wine to enhance the course, then once we finished we waited thirty minutes for the next course.
Their menu offered two choices, one for meat and one for fish; the food was fantastic. We started with a modern salad hanging from a steel line on mini clothes pins which came with a green juice. The bread and pumpkin butter were fantastic! That was the only small portion, the rest were liberal portions, the first course was a sour dough waffle neatly topped with vegetables and a creamy cheese, then next a risotto with millet porridge, fried ribs and these really cool cabbage chips. Our main course was a nice size piece of boar back with a parsnip pure, parsnip chips, potato turnip and a sour turnip foam.
It was a fantastic three courses that we followed up with the extra dessert for 5 Euro. The dessert was the best part, it was all white chocolate based with some interesting pumpkin sponge cake, pumpkin crumble and caramelized pear chips. The chunk of white chocolate ganache was amazing, perfectly sweet and creamy with the cottage cheese foam. Amazing, loved every bite of it.
