The Corn Beignet That Explains the Soča Valley
A tasting room in a hamlet outside Kobarid, a single tasting menu at €335, and a self-taught chef whose house takes bookings through its own online system or by email. The room earns every kilometre of the drive.
The corn beignet arrives first, or near enough. Fermented ricotta inside, smoked trout roe on top, the whole thing barely two bites. It is the dish Ana Roš has kept on the menu almost since she started cooking here, and it does the job every opening course should do — tells you where you are (the corn, the river fish, the fermenting), tells you who is cooking (nothing borrowed, nothing polite), and sets a bar the rest of the meal has to clear.
Hiša Franko is a restored guesthouse whose legacy runs back to 1861, in a hamlet called Staro selo about five kilometres outside Kobarid town. The Kramar family took it over in the 1970s; Roš, self-taught, married in and eventually took the kitchen. A place on the World's 50 Best list since 2017, and International Chef of the Year for 2026. All of it built in a village of roughly a thousand people in the Julian Alps, without moving to a capital city to do it.
A kitchen that reads like the valley it sits in — decisive, local, and unbothered by what fine dining is supposed to sound like.
Editorial Deep
The corn is grown, dried and milled locally; the ricotta ferments in-house; the trout roe comes from the Soča and its tributaries. That chain of provenance is why the beignet tastes the way it does — sweet-lactic where a supermarket version would be flat, saline in a way that reads as river rather than sea. It is a two-bite dish that carries the whole geography of the valley on it, and it explains why Roš has never bothered taking it off.
Lunch and dinner are two different rooms. At the 12:00 sitting the light comes off the valley and through the windows, the pace is longer, and tables of two can spend three hours over the menu without anyone rushing the wine list. By the 19:00 seating the room tightens — candles, warmer lamps, the murmur of a full house of forty-odd covers, and a soundtrack that sits low enough to keep conversation intact across a four-top.
A server noticed a guest at the next table looking at the fenugreek on the potato course and, unprompted, brought a small dish of the raw seed so the table could smell it against the finished plate. That is the register the floor works at — genuine interest in what the kitchen is doing, delivered without ceremony. Pacing across the tasting is well-judged, and the pairings team knows the list cold; ask about the orange wines from the Vipava and you get a real conversation, not a rehearsed one.
Against Atelier Amaro in Warsaw or Noma in Copenhagen — the obvious comparables for a hyper-local, tasting-only kitchen in this part of Europe — Hiša Franko sits meaningfully below both on the sticker, and the food is not the lesser thing. What €335 buys here is a menu built almost entirely from a single valley, cooked by someone who did not train through a Paris apprenticeship system, in a room that has not been retrofitted to look like a Michelin room. The pairings are the line item to think about; at €135–190 a head on top of a €335 menu, they are the fastest way the bill grows, and the by-the-glass pours from the same list are the honest workaround for anyone who does not need the full pairing arc.
Do not come back if a three-hour tasting menu is a chore rather than a pleasure, or if the drive into the Soča Valley registers as work. This is not a room that rewards a diner who wanted a shorter meal or a lighter register — the menu is one length, one shape, and takes the evening it takes. The €335 is easier to justify on the first visit than the second if the format itself is not the draw.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The tasting menu is the only option — but the corn beignet with fermented ricotta and smoked trout roe, and the hay-baked potatoes with fenugreek, are the anchor courses to watch for.
“A kitchen that earns the drive — the corn beignet alone explains why.”
Book direct through the website, take a room upstairs so the drive home is not a factor, and go for lunch if the food is the point. If a three-hour tasting is not the format you want, the Soča Valley has excellent one-plate lunches within twenty minutes of Kobarid town — this room is for the diner who wants the full menu.
The Verdict
