Ana Roš started cooking relatively late. “I was 30 years old and pregnant with my first child,” she says. Which makes it all the more improbable that the self-taught Slovenian would come to land the title of The World’s Best Female Chef. But after a decade of what she describes as “struggling with pans and knives, days and days of throwing things away, trying every single day to understand more,” the accolade is hers.

It was not exactly written in the stars: her father was a doctor and her mother a journalist from a family of diplomats. Roš, who speaks five languages, was studying to become a diplomat herself, until the day she swerved in a different direction entirely. After she met her husband, Valter Kramar, a Slovenian wine specialist and collector, the couple decided to take over his parents’ restaurant, Hiša Franko, in Slovenia’s remote Soča Valley - and resolved, before long, to shake things up.