We speak to David Žefran, the chef cooking the Julian Alps from his larder.
In Jasna, on the edge of Kranjska Gora and a few kilometres from the point where Slovenia, Austria and Italy meet, Milka serves a single surprise menu each night on ceramics made by Slovenian craftsmen from minerals found around the lake itself, and on wooden pieces cut from the house’s own timber. The cooks carry the dishes out to the dining room, and much of what you eat in the colder months was gathered on the mountain in summer and has been waiting in the larder ever since. This is how David Žefran, head chef and co-owner, works, and it is why Milka Kranjska Gora has become one of the defining tables of the Alps.
The restaurant opened in June 2022 on the site of the old Milka guesthouse, a place that served simple, traditional food. The name comes from that house and from its previous owner. “When we renovated the building, we wanted to preserve some of that history while giving the space a new identity,” Žefran tells us. The renovation, by the Ljubljana studio Gartner, left six rooms and the restaurant on the ground floor, all of it under an idea the house calls alpine minimalism: limestone from Slovenia’s oldest quarries, dating back to Austro-Hungarian days and still chiselled by hand, the same stone used in the imperial buildings of Vienna, Budapest and Trieste, and a façade of burnt, hand-brushed larch that will never be painted and will shift in colour as the years pass. Look closely at the grey limestone and you can make out the organisms trapped inside it when the rock formed on the seabed, long before tectonic movement raised the Alps. One trace of the building’s former life survives—the space that is now the Rock Suite was once a nightclub, and the rock that gives the room its character was already there.
The first Michelin star arrived a few months after opening, and the second followed in September 2023, when the Guide singled out its modern mountain cuisine and an informal service in which the cooks themselves bring dishes to the table. The 2026 edition keeps Milka among the two Michelin-starred restaurants of Slovenia. Žefran was also named the Slovenian “Chef of the Year” by Gault&Millau in 2024, and Milka is a member of Les Grandes Tables du Monde.
A larder that starts at home
Milka is usually described as Alpine cooking with a Nordic accent. Žefran worked at Frantzén in Stockholm before the pandemic brought him home to Slovenia, and his kitchen does use fermentation, preservation and a restrained way of plating. When we put the label to him, though, he qualifies it straight away: “I wouldn’t necessarily say that we are Nordic. It is a label that became attached to Milka, partly because of my time at Frantzén and our use of fermentation. Of course, there are parallels. But our cooking is not Nordic in its essence.”
What is interesting is where he says those techniques really come from. They are, he tells us, much closer to home: “Growing up, preservation and fermentation were part of everyday life. We fermented, preserved and pickled vegetables, and buried them in sand for the winter. Less desirable cuts of meat were also used because you simply didn’t waste food.”
That is the root of what he calls contemporary mountain cooking, grounded in Slovenian tradition and the terroir of the Julian Alps. The house adds an idea Žefran returns to often: a great product should not be over-manipulated or buried under superfluous components, and technique exists to amplify its natural flavour. He also likes to revive local customs, techniques and ingredients that had slipped out of use.
Summer in a jar
Seasons in the Alps are short and harsh, and at Milka everything is measured accordingly. Whatever is gathered in the warm months, from conifer branches to wild berries and herbs from the high pastures, has to last through a winter when there is nothing left to pick outside.
When we ask what is in the larder right now, Žefran answers with an inventory: “Our larder has quite a bit of the Alpine summer stored away for the colder months: unripe berries, different leaves, dried flowers, pickled flowers and fermented chillies, among other things.”
Fresh produce comes from a radius that ignores customs posts. “Our idea of local is not restricted by an administrative border,” he explains. “We generally work within roughly 150 kilometres of the restaurant, which means that sometimes the ingredients come from Slovenia, and sometimes from just across the Austrian or Italian border.” The menu closes with the names of the people who make it possible, among them the Orešnik cheesemakers, the Kolenko mill, the Pustotnik and Zajček farms, the Štajnbirt butchery, the game specialists Divjačina Meglen, Mateja Reš’s garden at Vrt Okusov and the Rogaška glassworks.
Fifteen courses through the Alpine autumn
So what do you actually eat at Milka? The menu is never fixed to a season. “It changes continuously depending on the availability of ingredients and, of course, my inspiration,” Žefran tells us. “As we move from summer into autumn, some of the ingredients currently on the menu, such as tomatoes, peaches and eggplant, are gradually going out of season, so the menu will evolve with them. We prefer to work this way rather than keeping a fixed menu for a set period of time.” Nor is there a formula for building the dishes. “It can start with an ingredient, a memory, a technique, or sometimes just an idea that I want to explore,” he says. “Sometimes a dish comes together after the first try, sometimes it takes multiple attempts and a lot of adjustments. And sometimes I get bored of the dish before I even finish it.”
The menu these days runs to fifteen courses, which can be joined by the house signature of beetroot with bear fat and caviar, and by the cheese board, taking dinner to seventeen servings in all. It opens with tomato, habanero and lemon verbena. Next comes the Linzer eye, which borrows its name from the classic Austrian biscuit and takes it towards chicken liver and barberry. Trout belly arrives with trdinka corn, a traditional Slovenian variety, and horseradish; chamois with preserved berries and daikon.
Then crayfish, with Bozner sauce—the egg, mustard and chive sauce that accompanies asparagus in South Tyrol—and pork head. Danube salmon, as the huchen is known, a large salmonid of the Danube basin rivers, is served with kohlrabi and pine. Squash with quince and pork cracklings follows, then rainbow trout with potato and tarragon, chicken gizzard with fermented potato and bell pepper, a brioche with wild boar and cream cheese, and deer with chanterelles and yeast.
The final stretch brings peach with yellow tomato and bee pollen, sweet potato with star anise and egg yolk, salted milk with aubergine and barley and, to finish, pork fat cakes, which the MICHELIN Guide describes as warm doughnuts with hazelnut and apple. When the season turns, the menu turns with it: in spring, the same Guide highlighted spelt with Tolminc cheese cream, snails and wild garlic.
The cooks come out
What sets a dinner at Milka apart happens outside the kitchen. We ask him why he built the service this way, and his answer begins with something very practical: “I think the experience is better for both the guest and the kitchen team. You can spend hours working on a dish, but traditionally, the moment it leaves the kitchen, you are completely detached from the person eating it. You don’t see their reaction or get to share that moment with them. I wanted to change that.” Someone who has spent hours on a dish, he adds, talks about it with a different kind of enthusiasm and knowledge, and swapping roles brings the team together: stepping into someone else’s job teaches you their responsibilities and builds respect between the kitchen and the floor.
It is telling where he places the emphasis when he talks about what he learnt before Milka. He brought back, he says, “an obsession with the small details a guest might never consciously register but always feels: the way a plate is set down, the volume of music, the timing of a pour, a room read correctly before anyone at the table says a word.” The music, in fact, is his own. Before he turned to cooking he was working as a DJ while finishing a master’s in sociology, and he has built several playlists for the house over the years, with at least three running at any point in the day: one for the kitchen, one for the dining room, one for the terrace. “Music has always been an important part of my life, and I see it as another element of the dining experience,” he says. “It can completely change the atmosphere of a space, so I like to think about what we are listening to just as carefully as we think about the food, drinks and everything else our guests experience.”
What he left behind from those years was the idea of the chef as an artist guests come to see: “That view puts you at the centre instead of them. Our job is to make the experience good for the person sitting in front of us.” The house translates this into service that is warm and professional, far from the rigid etiquette so often attached to fine dining. What Žefran wants the guest to feel across the three and a half hours of dinner, he sums up like this: “As if they have stepped into a friend’s house. Relaxed, well taken care of, but still experiencing something special. Of course, the food and service need to be at a very high level, but the atmosphere should feel easy and natural. Hopefully, over those three and a half hours, they get to experience a little bit of Slovenia and the Julian Alps.”
Slovenian wine, spring-water ice and house tea
Slovenia has more than 28,000 winegrowers, and Milka’s cellar is built around them, with room for smaller, lesser-known producers from every region of the country. Given its position on a three-country border, the list extends to Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Carinthia and Styria, alongside the great classic regions of France, and the MICHELIN Guide points to the house’s direct relationships with many of those winemakers.
There are also house cocktails made with regional ingredients and served over ice from Slovenian spring water, and a non-alcoholic pairing that the kitchen and the bar build together for those who would rather not drink alcohol. The coffee is responsibly sourced and roasted in Slovenia. Some of the tea is picked in the surrounding landscape and dried in the restaurant before being brewed in a clay pot handmade for the house.
Kranjska Gora on the culinary map
Until recently, Kranjska Gora was known above all for skiing and mountain holidays, with no place of its own on Slovenia’s culinary map. When we ask what has changed for the town since the stars arrived, Žefran is measured: “I don’t think that much has changed. There are a few more culinary travellers coming to the area, and consequently they are also discovering some of the other restaurants here. I think that is a good thing for everyone.” For the restaurant, however, a great deal changed: “Our expectations changed, and so did the expectations of our guests. The game became more serious, but luckily, we haven’t.”
Milka shows that cooking of this calibre can be built from what lies within 150 kilometres, using techniques these mountains relied on out of necessity long before fine dining adopted them. Žefran learnt to ferment and preserve at home, well before Stockholm, and has carried that knowledge into a dining room where the people who cook also serve. Our advice is to book well ahead and, if you can, stay the night: Milka’s breakfast, open to non-residents too, extends the visit into the next morning with Alpine produce, speciality coffee and tea.
At Milka, the Slovenian mountains reach the table with their calendar, their larder and the hands of the people who cook them.
Milka
Vršiška cesta 45, 4280 Kranjska Gora, Slovenia
Dinner Wednesday to Saturday from 6pm, last seating at 7pm
hotelmilka.si
