Alfred Keller

Michael Gollenz cooks with Čikat Bay in front of him. At Alfred Keller, the restaurant inside Boutique Hotel Alhambra on Mali Lošinj, the Adriatic is not scenery added after the fact. It determines what reaches the pass: local scampi, tuna and the day’s fish, handled with French technique and enough restraint to keep the island visible on the plate.

A room named for its architect

The restaurant takes its name from Alfred Keller, the Austrian architect who designed the Art Nouveau villa in 1912. The building has changed and expanded into the present hotel, but its original proportions still give the dining room a particular formality. The terrace opens that formality toward the water. A meal moves between the villa’s composed lines and the working coastline beyond it.

Gollenz’s kitchen must answer both. His cooking is polished enough for the room, yet its strongest material comes from the immediate geography. The menu has included scampi tartare with Thai salsa, tuna sashimi and Adriatic fish fillet. Those dishes show the range of his method: raw seafood that depends on exact knife work and temperature, bright seasoning used as contrast, and cooked fish where timing matters more than ornament.

French structure, Croatian product

Gollenz has described his approach as respect for tradition without giving up innovation. At Alfred Keller, that means classic French control applied to Croatian ingredients, then opened to flavours from farther away when the product can carry them. A Thai-inflected salsa beside local scampi works only if the shellfish remains the centre of the dish. The same rule governs the rest of the menu. Technique establishes order; the ingredient keeps its identity.

The restaurant earned its first Michelin star in 2021 and retains one star in the 2025 guide. That recognition belongs to the work at this address, not to a borrowed résumé. The kitchen’s standing also includes 17 points from Gault&Millau. The useful fact beneath those awards is consistency: fish cookery, sauce work and seasoning must hold through a full service, across a menu that changes with availability.

The cellar extends the same regional attention. Wine director Filip Veselovac oversees a list of roughly 530 selections, with particular depth in Croatian and Italian bottles. On an island table, those wines provide more than prestige. Local whites can meet the salt and sweetness of scampi; structured Adriatic and Italian reds give the kitchen room to work with meat and reduction. The pairing program keeps the plate and the coast in the same conversation.

The people behind the view

A bay-side dining room can lean too easily on its setting. Gollenz’s discipline is to make the food carry equal weight. The view may set the pace, but the kitchen earns attention through repeated, technical acts: fish trimmed cleanly, raw preparations kept cold, sauces reduced to the right density and each garnish stopped before it obscures the main product.

That is the reason Alfred Keller matters on Made By. The historic villa and Čikat Bay supply a memorable frame, while Gollenz and Veselovac turn the frame into a working restaurant. One controls the passage from sea to plate; the other builds the bottle list around it. The craft is not the luxury surrounding the meal. It is the precision that keeps local fish tasting like itself inside that luxury.