I’d known about Restaurant week for quite a while now, but never got around to making a reservation until October 2019. My boyfriend and I tried out the Kult 316 restaurant, which is a fancy place run by the Higher school for hospitality and tourism in Ljubljana, where the students get to show off their work. We were more than satisfied, with both the service and the food. So much so, that we’re planning to come back and blow our budget during non-restaurant weeks as well. It turns out that their regular menus are not actually eating-bread-and-water-for-a-month expensive, so this was a winning choice altogether, as we now know a new fancy and affordable place.

The spring edition of Restaurant week usually happens in April, but this year it got postponed to June due to the coronavirus crisis. This time we went to Altroke, a restaurant in Ljubljana Oldtown with Istrian-inspired food. The menu looked delicious and I actually had quite high expectations – although the food was good, I was a bit disappointed, because it just wasn’t WOW! good like last year.

The dessert was just a bit too sweet, with nothing sour to balance that, and the appetiser beef tagliata and risotto were a bit bland. The service was somewhat rushed and they kept forgetting to pour us more wine (they were pouring by the glass), same with tiny jugs of water. This may sound like nitpicking, but that’s what you expect when you go to a fancy restaurant, particularly during restaurant week when all the places are flexing their culinary muscles. Nonetheless the food was good and even great for the promotional price of 19eur, and the fennel soup was amazing! I don’t think I’ll be coming back to pay the full price though, because Altroke is quite expensive and definitely overpriced from what we’ve seen here.

Even though Slovenia is right in the midst of the second wave of corona, we still managed to attend the autumn edition of Restaurant week. So, this time we went to Shambala, an Asian fusion restaurant in the centre of Ljubljana, which got the Michelin plate award this year. Honestly, I was quite impressed! The flavour combinations were innovative and absolutely delicious, the ambient and the service was nice, and they even had me voluntarily eating pineapple in 2 dishes. For the record, I can’t stand pineapple, but they somehow marinated it into something quite tasty, so I didn’t mind it at all. I loved that all the dishes came with flowers for decoration (because we are a bit weird we even ate the one that came with the salad), although the meat was a bit overcooked. All in all it was absolutely worth the money we spent though.

We also ordered 2 extra courses that weren’t included with the regular Teden restavracij menu, but were meant as a complimentary special offer, as well as dessert. I’m really glad we did, because the beef noodles with kimchi might just be my new favourite thing, which I’ll try to recreate at home as soon as possible.

The spring Restaurant week edition was once again postponed to June due to the pesky C and this time we went to Kevder, a lovely restaurant within the small family-owned hotel Pok in Brezovica, about 20 minutes out of Ljubljana. Maybe it was the post lockdown hype and the herbal gin tonic, or maybe it was just that great, but I loved it! The ambient was very nice and the food was local, seasonal and delicious (they promote it as “green cuisine”). The staff were friendly and you could tell they were a tight-knit family.

If I had to complain, I’d say the portions for Restaurant week were too small, but we ordered an extra cheese plate and the home-made ice cream (I had apple pie and my boyfriend had mango and raspberry) and I was a happy foodie. The portions we saw coming to other tables were normal, so we’re planning to come back, because the smoked bull meat we got was a total masterpiece and so was the intro pea ice cream (who would’ve thought). The waitress, who turned out to be the girlfriend of the owner’s son, told us they’d made the ice cream early that morning and I could tell, because it was amazing. We also had a slight mishap when the power went out for quite a while, but they quickly set up a romantic atmosphere with candles and were super flexible and chill about the whole situation.

For the 2022 culinary experience we chose Landerik, a restaurant close to our new home which had recently received a Michelin plate rating. I therefore had very high expectations and can honestly say that I was not disappointed. In fact, I was positively surprised by how top notch the whole experience was compared to other restaurants during Restaurant week and I’d give them a 5+ star rating if I could.

The food, the service and the atmosphere were perfect and it was unexpectedly also the first time during Restaurant week that we had stuffed ourselves full as the portions were not small. The mushroom soup was superb and in the words of my partner: ‘the most mushroom soup ever’, the veal cheeks were deliciously tender and the dessert was not too sweet, which is my common complaint. Additionally, I loved that they promote local cuisine in a fancy way, so every dish had its own backstory of local suppliers and all the wines were Slovenian as well. We will definitely eat there again!

In spring 2023 we chose the Georgie bistro because my friends heartily recommended it and we were both glad for it, because it was amazing. However, due to a confusing booking system, we managed to book our table a few days before Restaurant week officially started, so we ended up eating the regular (more expensive) 5 course tasting menu instead of the promotional one. I still decided to include the review here, because we didn’t go anywhere else for this restaurant week and because the experience was simply too good to ignore.

The food was very original and still seasonal and rather local in taste, with no exotic avocados or mangoes. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I love chefs that can make novel, fancy food without relying on the wow factor of exotic ingredients too much. They did use koji mold to age their pork and it was really tender and delicious + they got my partner to eat Brussels sprouts, which he really dislikes, so you better believe the food was exceptional and we gladly told them so.

In autumn 2023 we went for a family visit to Ptuj right during Restaurant week and we chose to have lunch at gostilna Ribič. I loved the ambient out on the terrace right next to the Drava river and both the service and the owner were very friendly.

I chose the fish menu even though we were nowhere close to the sea and I was not disappointed. The food was delicious and I quite liked all the combinations, although overall they were a bit too on the sweet side for me – the raspberry butter was nice, but felt more like a dessert, and I felt the same about the blueberry jam with the venison and the tomato sauce with the main dish. It was also a bit strange that they only offered one extra course in addition to the Restaurant week menu and that it was a (very tasty) meat dish, which did not really go well with the fish menu. I really liked that they used a lot of local ingredients like the jurka grapes and pumpkins though.

The second pick for autumn 2023 was Manna, a solid fancy restaurant close to our home where I have never been disappointed so far. Our friends chose the restaurant and I am happy to say they loved it as well – the waiter was fun and friendly, the ambient is always nice, particularly in the back garden, and I appreciated that they put flowers on all the food.

The food was phenomenal and we all particularly loved the cold “soup” pumpkin spice latte course with a really interesting combination of flavours, which was served by pouring the orange gel from a giant teapot into our bowls at the table. I love pumpkins, so the menu was perfect for me and the pumpkin seed oil foam/ice cream with dessert was one of my culinary highlights in the past couple of months.

We already went to Shambala in 2020 and we enjoyed it very much, so in 2024 we decided to try it out again. Once again there was absolutely nothing to complain about: the food was delicious with very creative Asian fusion combinations, the service and the ambient were very nice and we both left more than satisfied with our date dinner. 🙂

For Spring 2025, we tried out TaBar, which I suppose wants to be named “that bar” in Slovene. TaBar recently changed location and reinvented its concept a bit, so it is now housed in a very modern setting, which tries to be both posh and edgy with post-apocalyptic, half-finished concrete walls and a mix between a pub and a restaurant vibe. It is neither here or there, but they get bonus points for exceptionally friendly service, refreshingly innovative wine-food pairings, which made me very happy as they weren’t all wine, but also special kinds of beer and light wines; and super long dessert spoons. However, on the food front TaBar quite honestly loses points as everything was a bit too unnecessarily fatty and greasy for me and none of the dishes were very memorable. Most of the food was quite enjoyable despite too much butter, cream and oil, but colostrum ice cream was something I quickly passed over to my partner after the first bite.