Greg Yurkovich : From a financier who knew nothing about pizza to a European TOP
Greg Yurkovich is not well-known considering that his tactics produce food in four restaurants in the very center of Ljubljana. And one more thing: on the list of The Best Pizza Chef , which ranks the best international chefs, recently included him on the list of those who are on the rise and deserve special attention.
But not only the Best Pizza Chef award . Late June was also the time for other good news: Pop’s Pizza Place, where they bake according to Yurkovich’s recipe and under his supervision, ranked 34th among the best European pizzerias according to 50 Top Pizza, which makes detailed rankings for all major world regions, and Italy in particular.
A cozy pizzeria on the banks of the Ljubljanica River with an eclectic yet homely interior, which also boasts a certificate of genuine Neapolitan pizza, is another of the rare restaurant addresses in Slovenia that, with its presence on international charts, draws attention to the local scene.
Who would have thought that not long ago Greg Yurkovich had no idea about pizzas.
The path between burgers and pizzas
The Slovenian-American Yurkovich is not actually a professional chef or pizzaiolo . He found himself in this industry through a series of coincidences, but he survived because of his character trait of not being afraid of a challenge and learning. He is a political scientist by education, and worked as a financier. Before returning to his parents’ homeland from California, he was involved in private equity investments.
He never thought that one day he would be grilling burgers , carving tuna and appearing on stage with some of the best pizza masters, as happened at the end of June in Milan. In his own way, he is another in a series of Slovenian chefs who came from completely different industries, overcame the obstacles of a lack of culinary education and, probably also due to the ability to look at this business from a completely different perspective, rose to the top. Such are the two best in the field of fine dining , Ana Roš and David Žefran .
So what chain of events led the financier to the point where he is now the head chef for a cluster of three Ljubljana bars, collectively known as Pop’s, and also Gostilni As? First and foremost, we must put the acquaintance from his youth, when Yurkovich’s family only came to Slovenia for holidays and visits – and they always stopped in Dutovlje. One of the legendary pubs, designed by former customs officer Svetozar Raspopović – Pope, operated there. This fiery and unusual restaurateur always impressed all his guests: partly with his performance, but even more with his dedication to consistently using the best and freshest ingredients. The frequent visits also resulted in a friendship between Yurkovich and Sebastijan Raspopović , a local son, he says.
Let’s fast forward. In the meantime, Yurkovich had grown tired of the United States and – at first they thought it was only temporary – moved to Ljubljana with his family, his wife, singer Hannah Mancini, and his daughter. The family integrated nicely into the city’s society. And so one day, Lior Kochavy (Odprta kuhna ) offered to judge burgers on a special day at the market – because he’s American and probably knows each other. Yurkovich said he’d rather just compete. Since he needed a catering background, he went to Raspopović Jr. It worked out. In 2015, they became partners and started their first joint project, Pop’s Place, known for its burgers . The next one, four years later, was dedicated to pizza, then came Aperitivo in Knafljevo prehod, and Yurkovich took over thinking about food at Gostilna As, which is a completely different scheme, more inclined towards the principles of fine dining . Their partnership is based on the fact that Raspopović is responsible for everything related to the organization, and Yurkovich for the food.
The circle that began in a tavern in the Karst region also concluded in the same tavern, except that it has now been in Ljubljana for a long time.
From a complete beginner to an apprentice in a Neapolitan pizzeria
How such a leap, from finance to pizza and burgers , is even technically possible is best described by Yurkovich’s anecdotes about how he trained to be a pizza baker. When he and Raspopović decided that pizza would be a nice new challenge after burgers , he knew nothing about it. “0.0,” is the precise Yurkovich , a man of numbers. He courageously enrolled in a beginner’s course, where else but in Naples, at a school called Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana , AVPN.
It started out desperate, he says. “I arrived in Naples, and there was chaos. I barely found an apartment, which I rented through Airbnb . Pickpockets everywhere: they immediately tried to rob me on the bus. My first call was to my wife: ‘I don’t know if this is for me. An absolute crisis.’ Then the ten-day course began and it sucked me in, because pizza napolitana is not just a recipe, it’s a story, a philosophy. After the first shock, the city also began to accept me, or rather, I adapted to their way of life – passione e cuore . What’s more: I fell in love with Naples. I still saw chaos, dirt, broken cars – but also a certain elegance that is quite special, nowhere else had this feeling come to me with such force.”
Final exam: he completely ruined the first pizza, but somehow managed to make the second one. He only returned to Ljubljana long enough to shout that he had no idea and had to go back. On the advanced course, he says, he baked two hundred pizzas a day, working with a Sardinian from morning to night. He returned to Ljubljana again and thought desperately: “I still don’t know what I’m doing.” (Although: it couldn’t have been that bad, because in As they baked sixty pizzas every Thursday and everyone was satisfied.)
Yurkovich furthered his education by working as an intern, i.e. for free, at Concettina’s pizzeria. ai Tre Santi : “Twenty people, and no one knew a word of English. I only said buongiorno in questo mi piace . But I got used to the language enough during work that we could communicate normally.”
A dough with no room for improvisation
Yurkovich mastered it with his rebellious learning , so that he was noticed by international experts? “We knead the dough with yeasts that I bred myself, based on wine. My uncle is the Croatian winemaker Vlado Krauthaker . We buy flour in Italy, because for a repeatable result I need to have one in which the protein content, i.e. the strength of the flour, is measured extremely precisely. We bake six hundred to seven hundred pizzas every day and the process must be controlled and predictable, there is no room for on-the-fly interpretations and improvisations.
We use around eighty kilograms of flour per day, which is mixed with yeast and water by a specialized machine, where we can precisely control the temperature needed to start fermentation. This then lasts 36 hours. This part, with the dough, is actually the most interesting and biggest challenge for me as a pizza baker. Then of course there are the ingredients, which we also look for in Italy. I wouldn’t mind if they were Slovenian, but as I say, we would get stuck with the flour, and with the mozzarella … But now you’ve reminded me: some time ago I traveled through the Italian province of Matera . When I returned, I was inspired to make a pizza with flavors that are typical there, or with ingredients that are particularly good. Pizza di Materina was born. Two and a half million views in a few days on social media. ” (laughs)
Not the boss, but the leader who picks up the piece of paper
This stubborn return to the source of knowledge – because the education, even more specialized, continued – and two hundred pizzas a day actually tell another story about Yurkovich . He does not have an inflated ego: because it is not easy to take on a brand new job and join twenty-year-olds who are just learning it, and endure the initial defeats. His sporting spirit is probably little known here. In his youth, when he still lived in California, he was a rower, and quite a good one: he even won a scholarship to the prestigious UCLA University in Los Angeles, where he studied political science and Russian, before switching to finance.
Even those two hundred pizzas a day aren’t just like that. A computer scientist, mathematician, or business analyst would recognize this as iteration: continuous improvement through numerous iterations, tiny steps with small new variables, based on the same equation.
Yurkovich admits that, even after entering the world of food, he still hasn’t shaken off some of the methods from his “previous” life: “As a financier, I learned a lot about why some companies are successful and others aren’t, and I continue to try to direct this knowledge into our projects. For example, we decided to be focused: why offer everything possible if it’s clear that the guest came for a burger. And the guest knows why he’s here: he wants high quality, an experience, something that didn’t exist in this form before. It seemed to me that such an offer was lacking in Slovenia. Even pizzas: they simply weren’t appreciated enough. And I wanted people to feel my desire to constantly try to raise the bar. I want them to come to our restaurant, for a burger or a pizza or an aperitif, and get more than they expected, for a fair price.”
And there’s something else Yurkovich , he says, brought from his previous career: a way of managing people. As he says, he’s repelled by boss characters, who are increasingly dying out in our country, but we all recognize them, due to the geographical location and old times. “Sebastijan and I act modestly. We don’t parade around like a pompous man in front of people who work hard. Because that’s the reality in our industry – hard work. Now let me appear among them all dressed in Louis Vuitton , with a Patek watch. Philippe ? I’d rather not have a watch at all. Instead of practicing, I pick up a piece of paper if I see it on the floor in a restaurant. I’m not friends with employees, but I’m not a boss either: I praise instead of yell, and above all, I’m polite,” says the interviewee.
In Ljubljana, he found the depth that California lacked
The move to Slovenia, which was supposed to be temporary, just happened. It was a little easier because my wife, who is American, also managed to continue her singing career here. But it seems that the decisive factor was that my husband, who is an interesting mix of Slovenian-Croatian roots, is surprisingly much more of a Naples person than a Disneyland person .
“We lived in Orange County , which is right between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the city of Newport . Beautiful beaches, beautiful mountains, beautiful deserts – but no depth. All this orderliness has become a little, I would say, perverse for me. There are no emotions in it anymore, everything is Disneyland , colorful and beautiful at first glance, but when you look closely, it’s all made of plasterboard . Just facsimiles. A hundred identical houses in a row or a whole settlement that looks like Positano . But it’s not Positano . Here in Ljubljana I go to the market, I buy from the fishermen, they know me. I go a few steps further, to my grandmother, who has dirty nails, but I love her vegetables. Or I go to Trieste for coffee. You don’t get that in California. But you get pressure to always have to do a little more, and then a little more, and then more and more. In the end, you become apathetic and nothing matters anymore.”
Published: 3.8.2026 at 09:08
SOURCE: https://odprtakuhinja.delo.si/
