Ana Roš was born in 1972 in Šempeter pri Gorici, in what was then Yugoslavia, and grew up in the town of Tolmin near Slovenia’s border with Italy, the daughter of a physician father and a journalist mother, according to her biography on Wikipedia. As a child she trained seriously in alpine skiing and earned a place on the Yugoslavian youth national team before deciding against a professional racing career.

She went on to study diplomacy, was a skiing champion with a talent for languages, and was on track for a career in international relations rather than gastronomy before meeting her future husband, sommelier Valter Kramar, according to the South China Morning Post’s profile of the chef.

Roš had no professional kitchen training when she entered the restaurant business. In 2000 she met Valter Kramar, whose family owned a modest guesthouse restaurant called Hiša Franko in Kobarid, and the couple began working there together, with Roš initially serving tables while Kramar worked as sommelier, according to the official Hiša Franko biography of Ana Roš.

When Kramar’s parents retired in 2000, Roš unexpectedly ended up running the kitchen herself, three months pregnant and with zero formal training; her first service was, by her own account, terrifying, with bread that would not rise and meat that came out dry, according to the South China Morning Post profile. She has since described failure as “an engine for life,” saying that accepting the possibility of failing “makes you fight harder,” per the same report. Roš has described her approach as shaped entirely by the Soča Valley around her rather than by any formal culinary tradition, sourcing nearly every ingredient from within roughly 50 kilometres of the restaurant, a hyperlocal philosophy documented in the Hiša Franko biography.

Roš’s profile shifted from a respected regional secret to an internationally known name after Netflix’s documentary series Chef’s Table devoted an episode to her and Hiša Franko, which aired on 27 May 2016, according to the episode’s IMDb listing. The episode introduced her self-taught story and remote Soča Valley setting to a global streaming audience well beyond the fine-dining press that had previously covered her.

Less than a year later, in January 2017, she was named The World’s Best Female Chef by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants organisation, an award formally presented at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne on 5 April 2017, according to The Upcoming’s report on the announcement. Roš called the recognition “a big responsibility to accept… especially as a self-taught cook,” adding that it gave people a reason to reassess Slovenia as a serious gastronomic destination, per the same report.

The Michelin Guide did not rate Slovenian restaurants until 2020, when its first Slovenia edition awarded Hiša Franko two stars, the country’s first Michelin recognition of any kind, according to coverage of the Michelin Guide’s own announcement of Hiša Franko’s three-star promotion. Just three years later, in 2023, Hiša Franko was elevated to three Michelin stars, becoming the first and so far only Slovenian restaurant to reach that tier and joining what Michelin itself notes was only the 140th restaurant worldwide to hold three stars, per the same Michelin Guide announcement.

Hiša Franko has also held a place on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list every year since 2017, ranking 32nd in 2023 and 48th in 2024, an eighth consecutive year in the top 50, before slipping to 69th on the extended 51-100 list in 2025, according to the restaurant’s official World’s 50 Best Restaurants listing page.

Alongside its third Michelin star, Hiša Franko was also awarded a Michelin Green Star in 2023 for sustainable, low-impact cooking, a distinction highlighted in the same Michelin Guide announcement of the restaurant’s promotion. Slovenian tourism officials and international press have both credited Roš with almost single-handedly putting the country on the global fine-dining map; the BBC has described her as “at least in part” responsible for turning Slovenia into one of Europe’s prime gastronomic destinations, a characterisation reflected in her Wikipedia profile.

In 2018, Roš was selected as one of seven “Sages,” an elite mentoring panel that judged the S.Pellegrino Young Chef competition’s Grand Finale in Milan, a role that placed her among a small group of internationally recognised chefs entrusted with identifying rising culinary talent, according to S.Pellegrino’s announcement of the 2018 jury.

Roš has not pursued the kind of mass consumer-brand ambassadorships common among television-first chefs; her commercial visibility instead runs through publishing and industry mentorship roles. In 2020, Phaidon published her first cookbook, “Ana Roš: Sun and Rain,” co-written with Kaja Sajovic, a commercial publishing deal that packaged her recipes and philosophy for an international audience, according to the publisher’s listing for the book.

Her most notable brand-level association is with S.Pellegrino, which named her one of the “Seven Sages” mentoring the 2018 S.Pellegrino Young Chef competition, a paid or expenses-covered ambassadorial role rather than a product endorsement in the conventional sense, per S.Pellegrino’s own announcement. No major appliance, spirits, or lifestyle brand ambassadorship beyond that role is documented in available reporting.

Hiša Franko remains Roš’s core business and is co-owned with Valter Kramar, whose family originally built the guesthouse restaurant; the two continue to run it together as business partners despite ending their personal relationship in 2017, according to Wikipedia’s account of the ownership history. Since then, Roš has expanded well beyond the flagship restaurant: she opened Pekarna Ana, an artisanal bakery in Ljubljana, and in 2023 launched JAZ by Ana Roš, a casual dining bistro in Ljubljana that later added a second location in Poreč, Croatia, per her official Ana Roš business website.

In 2025 she added a fourth commercial line, Ana Roš Drinks, a bottled ready-to-serve cocktail range launched with mixologist Anja Skrbinek and made with foraged Soča Valley botanicals and a bespoke vermouth produced with the Slovenian biodynamic winery Movia, according to Slovenia’s national tourism press agency. The expansion from a single co-owned countryside restaurant into a small multi-brand portfolio marks a deliberate diversification of her income beyond Hiša Franko alone.

No reliable public record of personal real estate, vehicles, or other major assets held by Ana Roš outside her restaurant businesses has surfaced in Slovenian or international reporting, and no specific figures for personal holdings should be assumed.

The one physical asset consistently tied to her name is the Hiša Franko property itself: a building erected around 1860 that served first as a farmhouse and later a World War I field hospital before Valter Kramar’s father converted it into a guesthouse restaurant in the 1970s, according to the Wikipedia entry for Hiša Franko. Ownership passed to Valter Kramar and Roš jointly in 2000, and the same source lists both as the restaurant’s current owners, meaning the property is a shared business asset rather than one Roš holds outright or personally.