MK Studio

If you’re exploring Maribor, this restaurant is a great place to stop and take a break and has a real holiday feel with its spacious terrace boasting views of the town, the Drava river and the Pohorje mountains in the distance. The menu focuses on fish from the Adriatic (including shellfish and plenty of grilled options), as well as meat recipes that include grass-fed Slovenian beef. There’s a more concise menu at lunchtime, plus a café and the sky lounge, both of which are perfect settings in which to relax.

On the outskirts of Maribor, Mak is the eccentric and fiercely individual restaurant of chef-patron David Vračko. The spaces, distributed across two rooms, combine eclectic furnishings with a deliberately understated table setting. Here there is no menu: the chef leads guests through a surprise journey, a kind of culinary performance made up of creative, colourful and at times unconventional dishes. The cuisine, contemporary and original, celebrates local ingredients with great imagination, through unusual textures and bold combinations, for an experience that is lively and outside the ordinar

Opened in 1972 and now run by the third generation of the family, the restaurant surprises guests with its modern, minimalist design and large glass walls that flood the rooms with natural light, from the moment they step inside. When booking, all you do is choose the length of the menu – three, five or seven courses for lunch, five or seven for dinner – while everything else is a surprise. In the kitchen, Gregor Vračko applies his deep knowledge of Styria, combined with remarkable creativity, offering a contemporary and unexpected interpretation of the region's outstanding produce.

Nestled in an idyllic setting, the restaurant is reached by crossing gently rolling hills until you discover a charming 16th-century building, once home to the Benedictine monks who started the winemaking business. Today, the winemaking tradition continues, accompanied by tasting itineraries in which the chef interprets local ingredients in a contemporary key, all in the evocative setting of the antique brick-vaulted cellars.