Restaurant Week: coming soon

The tastiest spring week of the year is coming soon – the price remains (largely) unchanged (19 euros), and new additions make it even better!

Spring Restaurant Week 2020 will take place from 20th – 29th March. The price of (most) menus remains unchanged at 19 euros. The exception is for the best rated restaurants (those with 3 or 4 ‘hearts’), where the price of a special Restaurant Week menu will be 25 euros. A total of 110 restaurants and inns will take part in Spring Restaurant Week – of which 12 are new additions.

A new feature of Restaurant Week 2020 is the www.tedenrestavracij.si website (available in both the Slovenian and English languages). This is the result of cooperation with the Slovenian Tourist Organisation whereby as of last autumn, Restaurant Week also began to address foreign visitors.

The main emphasis of this year’s Restaurant Week is combining the past with the present and future. According to Uroš Mencinger, the selector of the restaurants included in Restaurant Week, “Restaurant Week takes place when nature begins to bloom in spring, and then again in autumn when crops are harvested. Thus, Slovenia’s chefs will be getting creative in much the same way as nature works, and will offer diners at Restaurant Week a taste of the culinary future by combining tradition and modernity. Superior quality must be drawn from rich tradition, but at the same time it shouldn’t remain in the past but should rather build on and enhance tradition. By emphasising and combining tradition and modernity, the aim is that both elements are of equal importance in contemporary cuisine.”

Every year Restaurant Week emphases a new element that is important for a superior culinary experience, while also maintaining all those existing ones. In doing so Restaurant Week raises the level of quality of Slovenia’s best restaurants and inns.

Previous emphases have now become a constant:

• 2015: local and creative (creative use of local ingredients in creating Restaurant Week menus);
• 2016: presentation of food (diners should also ‘eat’ with their eyes);
• 2017: nature-friendly (the impact of sustainability in creating Restaurant Week menus);
• 2018: amuse bouche (Restaurant Week menus should begin with a ‘welcome’ from the chef);
• 2019: accompanying wines (Slovenian wines and vintners at Restaurant Week).

The best of Slovenia’s restaurants and their chefs take part in Restaurant Week, which promotes the crème of Slovenian cuisine. It takes place twice per year – spring and autumn – for 10 days each, when the chefs demonstrate their abilities by offering 3-course menus for a wallet-friendly price of 19 euros in what have been labelled the ‘most culinary weeks of the year’. By taking part the participating restaurants reward their regular guests for their loyalty and invite new ones to become acquainted with fine dining, which doesn’t always have to be expensive.

Restaurant Week is an exclusive event in which only those restaurants that have been rated and chosen by the food critic Uroš Mencinger (via the website Šola okusov (‘School of Flavours’, www.vivi.si)) may participate, and is open to those who appreciate fine food.

Slovenian Restaurant Week began as part of Maribor’s tenure as the European Capital of Culture in 2012 when nine restaurants and 3,000 guests took part. In the two editions of Restaurant Week in 2019, more than 90,000 guests visited the 100 participating restaurants.