Biljana Milina- Pastry chef of the year 2019

The main protagonist of this sweet story is Biljana Milina, the chef de cuisine and pastry chef of Konoba Mate on the island of Korčula. She says that she has always loved all kind of cakes. She owes that love to her mother and her grandmother, but also to Korčula’s heritage of preparing desserts. She first started to work in a restaurant in Val Gardena in Italy, where she stayed for four years. Then she returned to Korčula and in 2000 opened Konoba Mate with her family. Biljana’s mom worked in the kitchen and Biljana on the terrace. Everything looked very good, so Biljana, full of self-confidence, decided to open her own pastry shop called “Amoreta”. While talking about that time she laughs and says that she thought “she would conquer the world”, but she soon failed. That did not discourage her. For a year she worked in the restaurant of the exclusive hotel Lešić Dimitri in Korčula, gained additional experience and in 2012 returned home to the family tavern, where she replaced her mother in the kitchen. Since then Konoba Mate has attracted many gourmet visitors with the excellent food and specially the desserts that delight the guests. At Konoba Mate you can enjoy the finest aromatic traditional sweets from the island of Korčula: klašuni, amoretti, cukarini, hrostule and rožata cake. Along with the traditional delicacies of the island, Biljana is not afraid to create new sweet recipes and experiment with available island products; almonds, basil, orange, figs, rose petals, laurel, sage and mint are common ingredients of her magical desserts.

Additionally, the pastry chef produces interesting jams made from untypical ingredients such as rose petals, citrus and tomatoes. The “Biljana’s sweet plate” we tried was a small culinary revolution: a harmony of flavours and a palette of colours that would delight everyone, from top professional pastry chefs to those with a “sweet tooth”. Thanks to her fantastic creativity, the boldness of using aromatic herbs in her sweet creations and above all because of the great love she puts in her work, Biljana Milina deserves to be awarded with the Gault&Millau trophy for the Pastry chef of the year 2019.