Opens 12 September 2026
The Restaurant
Two winters of work, a chimney taken down and rebuilt, and a kitchen that finally draws the way it should. The first service is on 12 September 2026.
The restaurant sits below the villas, where the slope flattens out before the water. One long window faces the lake. The doors onto the garden stay open from May until the weather turns, and for most of the summer the room people actually use is the terrace outside them.
We cook from the hills around us, which sounds like a slogan until you read the delivery notes: vegetables out of the garden behind the kitchen, lamb from a farm in the next valley, honey and cheese from the villages under the fortress. The bread is baked here, every morning.
The oven
Bread at seven, lamb by eleven.
The oven is brick and it holds its heat for most of the day, so the cooking follows the temperature down. Bread goes in first, while it is still too hot for anything else. By the middle of the morning it has dropped far enough for lamb, and by the evening it is doing the slow work: beans, whole onions, peppers pushed to the back.
The open fire beside it takes everything quick: chops, flatbread, vegetables straight onto the grate. There is a gas hob as well and we are not precious about it, but the fire is what the kitchen was built around, and you can taste which is which.
- Bread baked every morning
- Vegetables from the garden behind the kitchen
- Lamb from the next valley
- Honey and cheese from the villages below the fortress
The garden terrace
One long table rather than several small ones. In summer we lay it in the morning and it stays laid until the light has gone.
A week on the board
The menu is short, and it changes on Thursdays.
This is not the menu, because we cannot honestly give you one yet. It is the sort of thing the board might hold in the second week of September, when the garden is still giving and the evenings have started to cool.
- Warm bread, butter, salt
- Ajvar and young cheese
- Garden tomatoes, oil, oregano
- Nettle and potato soup
- Peppers roasted whole on the fire
- Flija, when there is time for it
- Lamb baked slowly under the saç
- Beans left in the oven overnight
- Pite with spinach from the garden
- Chops from the open grill
- Plums from the trees by the gate
- Honey, thick cream, coffee after
Halal breakfast is served for guests staying in the villas. Anything else, from allergies and small children to people who would rather skip the meat, tell us when you book and the kitchen will work around it.
Opens
12 September 2026
Lunch
12.00 – 15.30
Dinner
18.00 – 22.30
Guests staying in the villas do not need to book. Walk down when you are hungry and we will find you a place at the long table.
The same fire
When the party outgrows the dining room: every house, the long table, this kitchen.