Jure, 38, and is business partner, used to run the successful Ljubljana café Bikofe, and then the equally popular Magda at the Ljubljana market, whose fate was ultimately sealed by the combination of the COVID pandemic and high rents.

Both places were ahead of their time, both in terms of their concept and drinks selection, as well as with their interior and music, and many of Ljubljana’s residents still pine for them today. That is perhaps why so many of them take the 50-minute drive into the heart of the Notranjska region, where an idyllic winding road leads you through small hamlets, pine groves and green grazing pastures.

Somewhere after Cerknica, Google Maps starts to get confused and tries to direct you towards Gostilna Cajnarje along a forest path. Quite a few drivers got stuck like that and had to be rescued with tractors, Jure chuckles.

The young couple set off for Cajnarje as soon as Magda closed in 2021, and practically overnight they were deeded the house, a former village watering hole popular with locals who liked to stop here for a snifter of brandy. Jure and Katarina, who now spend part of the week in Ljubljana and the weekends in Cajnarje (the restaurant is open from Friday to Sunday), knew from the very beginning that they wanted to serve traditional local food – but they did not know how to put this concept into practice, given that neither of them had ever worked in a professional kitchen.

In the beginning, chefs Jakob Pintar (Tabar) and Anže Gorenc came to their rescue, helping set up the concept and a draft menu, but today Katarina knows all the ropes in the kitchen. When neither she nor Jure knows how to prepare a particular cut of meat they are given, they simply give their fellow restauranteurs a call for guidance.

Their menu is a melange of inspiration and whatever they get from their growers; Jure comes to the table with a tiny notebook with the day’s specials scribbled on it: house spreads, daily soup, smoked trout, pork shank, meatballs in sauce, fried bull’s testicles, etc.

The wine list is more fixed, printed on neat retro paper, containing only sustainably produced wines: Slavček, Štekar, Terpin, Rogovila, Nando, Škerk, Radikon and the like. A bold choice, especially for these parts where half of the guests are still local residents. “It’s true that people come here with a reluctance to natural wines, but I believe in these wines, that’s why I push them, and now the guests are quite happy to drink them. If nothing else, they can always order beer,” explains Jure.

“I tried the bull’s testicles the other day – top-notch!,” I hear an elderly local explaining to a group of colleagues at a wooden table outside, covered with a checkered tablecloth and a bunch of garden flowers. The clientele is truly colourful and in the few hours we are there, we see trickling in bikers, cyclists, Ljubljana artists, former Bikofe regulars and striking locals in outfits that suggest they might be hunters.

If from the outside the house looks like another simple village pub with a giant lime tree in front of the entrance, the inside lets you know that someone who knows their business and is in touch with modern trends has had a hand in the interior design. Jure and Katarina collected vintage furniture from pubs that were closing down. The old cabinet behind the bar is from Jure’s grandmother and today sags under the weight of a wide variety of foreign and local spirits.

One of the first things a visitor with some musical sensibility notices is the soundtrack in the restaurant: a thoughtful, elaborate playlist by someone who has obviously spent a lot of time on music selection. There are records stacked up next to the turntable behind the counter: Otroci socializma, Tom Waits, Ennio Morricone, Johnny Cash, John Coltrane … There are also old toy cars that our parents used to play with, and glass pickling jars now full of dried chamomile, healing flowers and dried porcini.

Even the books on the shelves in the rooms around the restaurant are from another time, designed to evoke nostalgia – the Yugoslav Encyclopaedia, the ABCs of Sewing, the novels of Mladinska knjiga and the like. In one corner is a gorgeous old wood-burning stove and old faded black-and-white photos of the tavern as it once was hang on the walls, along with old carpet beaters, rusty horseshoes and a hunting trophy on the freshly painted green wall.

Modern paintings and photographs by contemporary Slovenian artists, with an impressive redesigned portrait of Josip “Tito” Broz by Tadej Vaukman as the most striking among them, provide a contrast to the previous century. All paintings are from the Ravnikar Gallery in Ljubljana and can be purchased by art-loving guests.

The crockery is gathered from all over – some from the grandmother, some from the aunt, some from antique shops – making up a lovely mishmash of fine china on which Katarina serves the first batch of cold hors d’oeuvres – butter with baked yeast, goat’s curd, bean puree with herbs and bean “cracklings”, smoked trout and trout tartar with cracklings, and even beef tongue. Two soups were on the menu that day – chicken and nettles.

Katarina and Jure get their ingredients from as many farmers and suppliers from the surrounding area as possible: they found a good butcher in Cerknica, they get their beef from the renowned Bajer organic farm in Stari trg pri Ložu, and they get most of their herbs and vegetables right from their neighbour across the road, including all the flowers decorating every corner of the restaurant.

In good weather, they draw their drinking water from a nearby stream, where villagers have been going for water for hundreds of years. The water from the Cerkniščica stream has such a reputation that people drive for half an hour to get it, so Jure and Katarina have an agreement that even after the house is renovated and the restaurant opened, locals can still walk across the plot to fetch water.

As the day turned to evening, Katarina set on the table illuminated by the rays of the setting sun heaping plates of main courses – a warm, savoury leek roll, delicious roasted cauliflower, trout in baking paper with vegetables, meat balls in a thick tomato sauce, and fried bull’s testicles with a slightly spicy mayonnaise on the side.

It is not hard to see why a reservation at Cajnarje is perhaps one of the hardest and most desirable to come by in Slovenia right now. As Jure and Katarina say, the reputation initially spread from Magda, but on the other hand, there is no restaurant that stands out so much, from here all the way to Unec. The place is often so busy that it makes you wonder how they manage, especially since they run the place alone, they have a baby and she has a job in Ljubljana. What is the recipe for success?

“What can I say, the people who come say they were looking for something like this – homely, unpretentious, with relaxed service and fine music. And sometimes they sit here for six, seven hours,” explains Jure. In short, we would like to see more such places.