At the beginning of Viktorina’s chef’s career was love. As a 14-year-old boy, he wanted to impress a girl by preparing her kung pao chicken according to a recipe from the magazine Woman and Life. “She liked the food, I dazzled her. Our relationship didn’t work out as expected at the time, but my love for cooking remained,” says the sympathetic black-haired man in his forties at the round table of the Chateau Petit restaurant in Břeclav-Hlohovec in Moravia.
David Viktorin is not only an excellent chef at the establishment in the dreamy Chateau de Frontiere, but also an entertainer. He can passionately talk about favorite dishes and their preparation, as well as spilling stories from his life. The most enthusiastic is in the back of the restaurant, where pickled vegetables and fruits of all kinds, including a few special ones, are removed from the shelves in the warehouse. These include, for example, pine cones, fruit stones in alcohol or rosehip wine.
“We experiment with everything possible, we try to ferment and pickle whatever we can,” he points to the filled canning jars. At the same time, his journey to fermented delicacies and a luxurious business with its own garden was a long one.
The most enthusiastic is David Viktorin in the background of the restaurant, where pickled vegetables and fruits of all kinds are removed from the shelves in the warehouse | Photo: Judita Matyášová
“If a person does not reach the bottom, there is nothing of him”
For the first years after school, he worked in a restaurant in the center of Brno, where he “smelled mainly about cash”, followed by an internship in the Bavarian Alps, which gave him more than his entire school education. “In three months, I had about three days off. We worked 15 hours a day, it was a big school. But after this experience, I started to enjoy cooking even more. Germany gave me a real kick. I use the motto that if you don’t dig to the bottom, you never get anything,” says Viktorin.
“At the time, I lived two kilometers from the restaurant on the slopes, so I walked from work through the forest in the dark completely exhausted. I was really at the bottom. Moreover, there were no mobile phones, so I couldn’t complain. I called home once a week from a payphone,” recalls the chef about his experiences at the beginning of the millennium.
He then spent the next ten years at the famous Brno restaurant U Kastelána. “When I first came there and opened the menu, I had no idea what each dish meant – like foie gras, various confit dishes and the like,” he describes.
The foie gras was love at the fourth taste
“At that time, everywhere else in Brno only made fried foods, stews, takeaways. Sometimes someone tried a fusion and made chicken breast with baked peach, which was the top of the time. Kastelán was the first to come up with different cooking at that time, because Michal Göth started going on internships to foreign restaurants and brought his experience to Brno. In addition, Kastelán was a breeding ground for other interesting gastronomic places in Brno. It was an incredible school,” says the chef. .
His former long-term workplace influenced him in many ways, for example, he still likes to prepare dishes with foie gras or truffle. “At Kastelán, I was taught how to work with foie gras by a French chef whose hands have passed through hundreds of kilos of liver every year. At first, foie gras is quite a challenge for someone who doesn’t know it. But with each subsequent tasting, it gets better and better. For me, it was love at the fourth tasting,” he says. His dishes can thus be described as a fusion of Czech, French and Asian cuisine.
For example, rabbit with tarragon, agnolotti with eggplant and mushrooms or pinwheel with strawberries appear on the menu of the restaurant Chateau Petit, where it has been operating for five years. The latter dessert is one of the most popular. “We eat pinwheels, cauliflower soup and veal spider most often. This is a hybrid between Znojmo roast and dill,” says Viktorin, commenting on the tastes of the guests.
The pinwheel is a favorite of the restaurant. | Photo: Jakub Zábranský, Chateau Petit
He also likes to add dill, which he says is underappreciated in the Czech Republic, to his meals. “People either like it or hate it. But those who hate it have bad memories of it, mostly from childhood, when dill sauces were not of high quality,” he muses.
In addition, according to him, traditional Czech fruits such as quince, medlar, sea buckthorn or wild Jerusalem artichoke have been largely forgotten in recent decades. Many of these species are planted in the garden behind the restaurant.
David Viktorin (43 let)
- He comes from Velešovice near Slavkov, lives in Brno.
- He graduated from Secondary School in Brno, specializing in gastronomy.
- In 1999, he joined the restaurant U Kastelána in Brno, where he worked under the management of Michal Göth and Jiří Nedorostek.
- He worked for a year as a chef at the Valoria restaurant in Brno and for three years as a chef at the famous Borgo Agnese restaurant in Brno.
- He completed internships in the Bavarian Alps and Colmar, France.
- He has been working in the Chateau de Frontiere hotel resort in Břeclav-Hlohovec since 2018, and in Chateau Petit since its establishment in 2021.
- In his free time, he devotes himself to his family. He draws energy while walking in nature, wearing a hockey jersey on the ice or playing football.
“I don’t need awards and stickers, a full restaurant is enough”
It was Viktorin who was one of the main initiators of his own garden and greenhouse, which also supply the ESSENS fine dining concept located in the same hotel resort. It is led by well-known chef Otto Vašák. “What we don’t cover our cultivation, we import from local growers and producers from the surrounding area,” he adds.
Most of the visitors to Chateau Petit are hotel guests, but sometimes locals from the adjacent Hlohovec come to eat. In 2017, the ESSENS company bought the border chateau Chateau de Frontiere, which was built at the beginning of the 19th century by Jan I. Joseph of Liechtenstein on the banks of the Hlohovecký pond. After extensive reconstruction, the entire hotel complex was opened a year later.
In addition to staying in a four-star hotel with wellness or visiting restaurants, you can also stop at a seasonal bicycle kiosk on the shore of the Hlohovecký pond. The resort is closed for two months in the winter, when, for example, the staff of the Chateau Petit restaurant go on internships at other restaurants.
Last year, Viktorin also received the Restaurateur of the Year award from the Association of Hotels and Restaurants of the Czech Republic. “It is also the work of the people on the set, in the kitchen and Mr. Jiří Zahradníček (general manager of Chateau de Frontiere, note ed.). The price is important, but we mustn’t rest on our laurels and we have to keep pushing because it can always be even better,” says David Viktorin.
In a second breath, he adds that he has no aspirations for other major awards. “I don’t need any signs, stickers and brands, it’s enough for me if the restaurant is always full. That’s the most for me. The feedback from people recharges me,” he claims.
“Czech gastronomy is better after the coronavirus”
David Viktorin has been working in gastronomy for more than twenty years and was a direct witness of its change for the better. According to him, the well-known Czech chef and gastroguru Zdeněk Pohlreich, with his TV shows, has largely advocated for this.
“Even now, after the coronavirus, things have changed for the better. People who didn’t cook for the love of the craft, but because of the money, preferred to do something else. Better chefs and businesses have emerged, which has a good effect on Czech gastronomy,” he thinks.
He, too, still cooks with the love he started with years ago. “I always tell the guys in the kitchen to cook as if they were cooking for someone they love. I stick to that myself. I make every meal as if I were preparing it for someone I love,” says the chef.
Photo author: Chateau de Frontiere Hotel Archive
Chateau de Frontiere
- As a classicist building, the border castle was built at the beginning of the 19th century by Jan I. Joseph of Liechtenstein on the shore of the Hlohovecký pond as his noble residence.
- The land on which the castle was built originally belonged to Moravia, but around the time of construction, the land border between the Margrave of Moravia and the Archduchy of Lower Austria was shifted to the center of the castle, where this border was formed by a stream flowing from a vase near a statue of a reclining nymph.
- In the years 1936 – 37, the Border castle was included in the defense strategy and a military bunker was concreted into its walls. After the chateau was confiscated in 1945, it served as an ornithological station, and it only underwent significant reconstruction in the post-revolutionary years.
- In 2017, it was bought by ESSENS. After extensive reconstruction, the entire hotel complex was opened a year later.
