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 at 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 with a selection of local cow, sheep and goat’s milk cheeses with apricot and raspberry jams and the homemade 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!