Irin., Bratislava: “A three-hour epicurean adventure” - restaurant review

If you watch cookery competitions on television, or if you follow The Bear on streaming, or if you just really love good food… Chances are you have heard of “Michelin Stars”. A Michelin star is basically the highest recommendation that the professional world can bestow on a restaurant. Eating in a starred restaurant will be, for most people, a rare treat of an experience. The opulence of the finest ingredients, precise cookery by highly ambitious and experienced staff, the kind of quality (and price) that you might save for your most significant family celebrations.

If you live in Budapest, you currently have a choice of seven restaurants which have been given this accolade. If go to Vienna, there are 10 of them. A couple more in Prague. But in the entire country of Slovakia, we have precisely: none. A look through the website for Irin. Bratislava leaves you thinking that they must be trying to break into this club. Its ambition and intention jumps out at you. They don’t tell you about the content of any dish on the menu, only that it is 9 courses, costs well over €100 by the time you have ordered wine, and is “alive and changes impulsively”. Actually “alive and impulsive” are maybe not things that I want to eat but I get the point: They’re trying very hard and it’s going to be fancy.

Sweetbreads with beetroot (l) and sourdough balls with bryndza. (source: Courtesy of M. T.)

So I arrived at Irin. feeling quite intrigued about how this dinner would be, would it live up to their ambitious image? We really didn’t know much about what we were going to eat until it was served to us, and the menu apparently changes at least once per season of the year. One thing that I loved about the design and planning of the dishes was the clear focus of the chefs on celebrating local Slovak food. It would be easy, even tempting when opening an expensive restaurant, to pack your menu with famous name ingredients from all over the world: North Sea scallops, Japanese wagyu beef, wines from Spain and France... But Irin. have chosen not to go that way, rather to celebrate the flavours of bryndza, pork, sweetcorn and local herbs, paired with wines that mainly come from Slovakia or one of our near neighbours. This was great to see, and I understand it is something that often impresses a modern restaurant critic.