One Tiny German Town, Seven Big Michelin Stars

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/magazine/one-tiny-german-town-seven-big-michelin-stars.html

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It was Saturday night at Restaurant Bareiss, an eight-table dining room in Baiersbronn, a small town in Germany’s Black Forest, and the chef, Claus-Peter Lumpp, needed seven orders of John Dory in garam masala. Three line cooks darted around him, fussing over black plates laid out on a checkered towel under a heating lamp, saucing and garnishing and somehow not running into one another. Germany was not, until very recently, known for its chefs, but it does have a well-earned reputation for quality control. Chefs used syringes to deliver pinpoint droplets of sauce and tested temperatures with yellow electric thermometers that looked like Geiger counters. The bulk of the cooking takes place on nine electric burners that were made to Lumpp’s exact specifications.

“Ten seconds,” Lumpp announced, loudly enough to be heard over the Pacojet machine that was micro-puréeing rhubarb ice cream.

“Jawohl!” his team answered in unison, as they prepared the sugar snaps and chickpea crème. Otherwise, the kitchen was bereft of conversation. As a rule, Lumpp doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to: during the entire Saturday-evening service, the only misfire was a wasted langoustine. Lumpp poked it with a knife and scrunched his face ever so slightly. When he turned around, Philipp Prinzbach, a 22-year-old line cook, flung the shellfish into the trash.

“The consistency was mushy,” Prinzbach would tell me the next day. But Lumpp, expressing his cooperative approach, praised the young cook for coming up with the idea of the langoustine dish in the first place. “The old authoritarian model won’t work anymore,” Lumpp, who is 49, explained, when I asked him about his kitchen management style.

Wolfgang Puck, whose mother was a hotel chef in Austria, started training as a chef when he was 14. Lumpp, who earned a coveted third star in the 2008 Michelin guide, had other plans. “My dream job was auto mechanic,” he says. He loved motocross racing and tinkering with moped engines and assumed that he would end up working in a garage. He enjoyed shop class, particularly making a chessboard and a copper bowl.

Lumpp’s culinary ascent began with the simple urge to drop out of high school around the time of his 16th birthday. His widowed mother had remarried, and the family moved to another town. Everything felt off: the new school, the new people. His mother gave him permission to leave school, but only if he found an apprenticeship. So Lumpp went to a nearby job center run by the government and asked the career counselor which field had the most positions available. Germany is famous for its vocational education. The country’s duale ausbildung, or “dual-training system,” combines apprenticeship in the workplace with rigorous lessons at state-run schools. Lumpp became an apprentice in the kitchen at the Hotel Bareiss. After his military service (spent as the chef at an officers’ club in Karlsruhe) and a short, unhappy stay in Düsseldorf, he returned to the Bareiss. With the exception of a year interning in three-star kitchens across Europe, including Alain Ducasse’s in Monte Carlo, he has remained there since.

Baiersbronn has a population of only about 16,000, but it is quite large in area, a little over 73 square miles in the state of Baden-Württemberg, more than four-fifths of it covered with woods. It is not one of Germany’s picturesque medieval towns, like Bamberg or Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which Walt Disney used as the model for Pinocchio’s village. Here, clusters of houses, with tile roofs and wooden shingles that look like fish scales, dot the hillsides. Down along the Murg River, sawmills and woodworking factories are still in operation, with their piles of logs and forklifts. The region as a whole is known for its large number of entrepreneurial businesses, and several of Germany’s medium-size family-owned enterprises make their home here, like Müller Mitteltal, which custom-builds heavy-duty trailers and whose factory sits at the bottom of the hill below the Bareiss.

But Baiersbronn is now on its way to becoming recognized as the world’s most unexpected restaurant capital. The Bareiss’s rival, the Schwarzwaldstube, at the Hotel Traube Tonbach, also has three Michelin stars, giving this isolated municipality the same number of three-star restaurants as London and twice as many as Chicago. The town is also home to a one-star Michelin restaurant at the Hotel Sackmann. Only a 30-minute drive away in Bad Peterstal-Griesbach is a two-star restaurant at the Hotel Dollenberg. To put all this in perspective, consider that Poland has a single restaurant with one Michelin star and none with two or three.

In his last State of the Union address, President Obama said America should emulate Germany’s knack for producing skilled workers — “high-school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges.” He was referring specifically to fields like engineering and computer science, but he could just as easily have been talking about high-end cooking. In the same way that Germany succeeds at making drills and luxury automobiles, the country’s apprenticeship process is successfully creating top restaurants.

Lumpp was educated in this system, as were a majority of the chefs in his kitchen. Richard Neumann, for example, spent three years alternating between months on the job in the hotel’s larger main kitchen, which caters to the everyday needs of guests, and weeks in the classroom at nearby schools. After his training was complete, he got a chance to work in Lumpp’s kitchen. This is right next door to where he cooked for years as an apprentice, but on an entirely different plane of cooking. “I only had a vague notion what it was really like over here,” Neumann, who is 24 and originally from Berlin, says. “Above all, the perfection.”

The first time I drove on the Black Forest’s empty, winding roads, it was a snowy winter afternoon, and I felt as if I were entering Germany’s version of the Coen brothers’ film “Fargo.” The Romans first called the area silva nigra, because the low mountains in southwestern Germany were so densely covered with trees that little light reached the forest floor. The region’s residents, who were mostly poor, made the most of their local resources. Their logs, for instance, were used to build the great Dutch trading ships.

Before it became a culinary destination, Baiersbronn was known for the rivalry between Hermine Bareiss, the founder of what would become the Hotel Bareiss, and Willi Finkbeiner, who expanded his family’s small inn into the Hotel Traube Tonbach; they engaged in spirited one-upmanship for generations. “If one built a suite, then the other had to have one,” Patrick Schreib, the town’s tourism director, told me. “One built a spa, the other wanted a spa. They were competing globally and locally, from one valley to the next.”

It was the Finkbeiners, however, who first recognized the potential of an upscale restaurant. In the late ’70s, gourmet cooking was just beginning to make inroads in Germany, which was better known for its Spartan tendencies. The deprivations of the Weimar era, characterized by hyperinflation, were followed by the Nazi regime, one of whose slogans was “cannons instead of butter.” The postwar years were yet another period of straitened circumstances. The country’s growing season — in most parts of Germany it lasts only from April to October, roughly speaking, weeks and even months shorter than in Spain and southern France and Italy — imposed its own limitations. (This may help explain the ubiquity of sauerkraut in Germany — as a winter substitute when fresh vegetables were unavailable — if not Germans’ fondness for fermented cabbage.)

For years, German cuisine generally consisted of hearty home cooking, dumplings, sausage and marinated pork roast. “Until 1970, Germany was a culinary desert,” says Wolfram Siebeck, the prominent German restaurant critic. “They loved their mother and grandmother’s cooking, but they couldn’t cook, the mother and grandmother.” The small portions and light sauces of nouvelle cuisine, exemplified by the dishes of Paul Bocuse and Alain Chapel in the Lyon area, put off many German diners. “The aversion to refinement,” Siebeck says, “has existed since Luther.”

The new German haute cuisine is rooted in classic French cooking but uninhibited by tradition. Its historic inferiority is a contemporary virtue of sorts — German chefs feel less bound to specific customs or ingredients than many of their French and Italian counterparts. There is a strong preference for local ingredients, but it isn’t a fundamentalist position. The night I was there, Lumpp served his langoustine with Asian mushrooms, soy gelée and coconut sauce, but he is just as happy cooking venison shot by the owner’s son and butchered on-site. Harald Wohlfahrt, the three-star chef down the road at the Schwarzwaldstube, put it this way: “Every product enters the kitchen equally.”

Wohlfahrt has watched the evolution unfold over the decades. In 1977, Willi Finkbeiner sent him to learn from Eckart Witzigmann, a culinary pioneer in Munich who had introduced nouvelle cuisine to a skeptical German public. It turned out to be an inspired step by the hotelier. As Germans became richer and had more money to spend on fine dining, it became possible to imagine moving beyond sauerkraut and sausage. “In Germany, it was first really going well in the ’70s,” Wohlfahrt says. “The eating culture benefited enormously from that.” In 1980, Finkbeiner made him the head chef at his restaurant, the Schwarzwaldstube.

Compared with Lumpp, who describes his rise as an underdog’s climb through adversity with the help of state-run institutions, Wohlfahrt comes across as someone who arrived on the scene full-fledged, dispatching terrines with authority. Yet he, too, is a product of state cooking schools, apprenticeship and master-chef certification. It was after he emerged from that system that he pushed himself relentlessly until he got his third Michelin star.

Wohlfahrt, 57, has since defended his three stars for more than two decades. He has developed meals for European astronauts in orbit. He has cooked for the Dalai Lama and the Clintons and, the week before I met with him in March, George Clooney. His triumphs are proudly trumpeted on the hotel’s Web site, and I was repeatedly told by the staff that the hotel was included in Patricia Schultz’s best-selling omnibus travel guide, “1,000 Places to See Before You Die,” which implores readers to “witness his signature grilled pigeon with chanterelle mushrooms.” (Witnessing an evening meal there costs around $200 — not including drinks.)

He is, in short, the dean of German chefs — and indeed five of the nine other three-star chefs currently working in Germany trained in his kitchen. He will not reveal, however, who will be the stars of tomorrow. Wohlfahrt forbade me to identify the chefs working under him today, because he’s afraid that the “smooth operators and headhunters” might turn up and try to lure them away before they are ready to lead their own restaurants. Given the industry’s competitiveness and Wohlfahrt’s success in training world-class chefs, it’s hard to question him. “It’s about discovering the talent and promoting it,” he says. “Then they can move on.”

Giggling, joking and the smell of stewing meat filled a kitchen at the Paul Kerschensteiner School in Bad Überkingen, where the Hotel Bareiss and the Hotel Traube Tonbach send many of their top apprentices. Binders sat open on desks, backpacks were lying on the ground and jackets were strewn in wrinkled piles as students gathered at four stations to prepare, with varying degrees of success, Hungarian pörkölt, a stew similar to goulash, over homemade noodles with a side salad.

Each station had a sink and burners. There were posters on the wall showing the proper way to store knives and reminding students about the color-coded cutting boards, red for meat, yellow for fowl, blue for fish and so on. The week before was devoted to frying, and the following week would be given over to grilling. On this afternoon, stewing was the order of the day.

Volker Wilsch, an accomplished chef who has worked in several kitchens with Michelin stars, including under the legendary Witzigmann in Munich, walked from station to station, calmly directing the students. “The less pressure the better,” he told a young woman cranking dough through a pasta maker. “Nina, normally you cut that very small,” he said to another student. “Much too much liquid,” he cautioned a third. He helped someone remove a blade stuck in a food processor.

The students wore the uniforms of the kitchens where they were apprentices, which gave the class the air of an all-star game. Robert Stauder, 20, who cooks at a restaurant called Speisemeisterei in Stuttgart, wore a shirt with a black silhouette of a fish with wings, an emblem he confessed to not quite understanding. “It’s art,” he shrugged. “It doesn’t have to make sense.” Stauder was preoccupied with trying to counter the excess tomato paste threatening to overpower his dish.

“We put in red wine and garlic, but we just can’t get the flavor out,” said Julia Pöllmann, 22, his partner, whose shirt bore the Hotel Bareiss insignia. “We’ve tried everything.”

The students at the Kerschensteiner School, like their counterparts in other industries, are known as azubis, an abbreviation of ‘‘auszubildende,” which means something like “trainees.” You still see people in Germany, whose apprenticeship system has its roots in the guilds of the Middle Ages, wandering about in broad-brimmed hats and old-fashioned vests; they aren’t historical re-enactors but craftspeople who can make you a wooden chair or, if they’re wearing top hats, clean your chimney. Seven students in Wilsch’s class wore tall paper chef’s hats; one was foppish and floppy; otherwise they were unremarkable.

The dual-training system is evidence of the close cooperation between business, the state and workers that helps account for Germany’s success, both in niche industries and big multinational enterprises like Siemens and Mercedes. Vocational schools, usually offering a course of study lasting between two and three and a half years, are financed and run by the states. Would-be apprentices apply not to the schools but to businesses, which decide how many future employees they need to have trained. Some specialties have national academies: aspiring hearing-aid technicians go to Lübeck, for example; piano builders to Ludwigsburg.

The system is not without its drawbacks. It has been criticized for steering the children of the wealthy into universities and working-class kids into lower-paying jobs; there have been complaints that managers rarely choose minority applicants for the most coveted spots. Compensation in the form of stipends can be quite low, too: azubis in the elite cooking program receive between $750 and $900 a month from their employers, and still have to pay for their room and board. It’s not easy to live on that, but it compares favorably with American college graduates leaving school tens of thousands of dollars in debt and lacking marketable skills. “Instead of learning purely theory or just performing handwork,” Lumpp says of the German practice of alternating on-the-job training and classroom instruction, “you get both pillars, handwork and theory.”

The Kerschensteiner School was founded in 1951, but since 1992 it has also had a special program to train students who have received university-ready high-school degrees for culinary and hospitality work. One driving force behind the program, still unique in Germany, was Hermann Bareiss, who runs the hotel of the same name and whose personal philosophy is that top hotels and restaurants need top employees. The Kerschensteiner School has three distinct tracks, which prepare students for a range of occupational possibilities, from working in a roadside tavern to an international hotel chain. As the director explained it to me, one group learns that there is red wine and white wine. The next group explores differences between rieslings. The students from the elite program study wines from Napa Valley. They learn two foreign languages and otherwise prepare for the very different work required by the luxury environment.

The dropout rate is low, just 3 to 4 percent. Last year’s national junior cooking champion, Alexander Neuberth, was a recent graduate. Wilsch, the teacher, says he has high hopes for a young woman in another class who is apprenticed to Douce Steiner, the only female chef in Germany with two Michelin stars and also a former student of Wohlfahrt’s.

The school’s curriculum tries to cover all aspects of the restaurant-and-hotel business — for instance, training chefs and servers together so they understand the demands of the kitchen and of the diners. From handling the clients to kitchen hygiene, aspiring chefs learn more than how to make a soufflé. For example, while Wilsch’s students were washing up after their stews, the apprentices in a classroom downstairs were learning about what their instructor called the “nice little creatures,” salmonella, staph and botulism, from a certified chef and restaurateur with a degree in nutrition science.

When it was time to compare the outcomes in the cooking classroom, we waited several minutes, an eternity in restaurant time, for the last group to be ready. “We have four different results,” Wilsch declared, surveying four plates of pörkölt. It was an understatement. The gravies ranged from red to brown; the garnishes varied from whole leaves of parsley to unidentifiable tiny green slivers. Some pasta resembled linguine, some looked like double-wide fettuccine. “What’s wrong with yours?” Wilsch asked a pair of student cooks.

“We don’t have any sauce left,” one said. “We weren’t sure what to do.”

“You could put broth in,” Wilsch suggested. “We have plenty of broth around.”

“My mistake,” the student said.

Another group had experimented with pink-tinted pasta — which clashed with the paprika-red goulash. “The noodles themselves are pretty,” Wilsch said encouragingly.

His classroom is a safe place, he says, in which to try and fail. “What’s nice here is that in contrast to the businesses, there’s no boss yelling, no guest waiting,” Wilsch would tell me later.

The first thing you see upon entering the Hotel Bareiss is a vase filled with red roses next to a bronze bust of the founder, the late Hermine Bareiss. An oil painting of her watches over the breakfast buffet. A room is named after her husband, Jakob, who died during World War II. The widowed Hermine founded the hotel in 1951, just as tourism in the Black Forest began to swell. Special trains from the industrial Ruhr Valley would disgorge oxygen-starved workers seeking a few days away from the pollution of the coal mines and steel mills. In 1966, as the hotel was still growing, Hermine sent her son Hermann, who studied cooking and worked in restaurants and hotels from London to Paris to Cairo, an ultimatum: “Move home,” she told him, “or I’m selling.”

Hermann did, and he eventually presided over the expansion of the hotel, which today has 230 beds and 260 full-time employees, along with a spa and sports facilities. When I visited him there on a recent Sunday afternoon, he recalled interviewing a young, awe-struck Claus-Peter Lumpp, who had never been inside a swank hotel. Lumpp caught Bareiss’s attention with stories about cooking with his grandmother. “He was exceptional already as a trainee,” Bareiss said. “He took joy in his work.”

Bareiss was wearing a gray suit and a purple tie with matching handkerchief and cuff links. His white hair was combed back; you might cast Christopher Plummer to play him in “The Bareiss Story.” Hermann’s son Hannes, a former student of Wilsch’s at the Kerschensteiner School, is already helping him run the business. Though the Hotel Bareiss doesn’t churn out widgets, it fits the definition of a mittelstand firm, one of the privately owned small- and medium-size companies that employ some two out of three German workers. The archaic sense of the term dates to medieval times, and essentially means the bourgeoisie, or the middle class between the aristocracy and the peasants. Today it refers to companies with anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred employees, and it evokes certain old-fashioned business virtues: an aversion to debt, a paternalistic sense of responsibility for employees and a focus on long-term planning.

One of the Finkbeiners at the Hotel Traube Tonbach described the attitude of these family-owned enterprises as “thinking in generations rather than quarters.” That means reinvestment, but because the families lack the resources of publicly traded hotel chains or new Emirati or Russian wealth, it also means picking your battles when making business plans. Hermann Bareiss told me that his family couldn’t afford to compete on what he called “hardware” — marble floors, gold fixtures, even artificial islands. Instead, it has chosen to compete in the realm of “software,” by which he meant his workers. The waiters I overheard that morning in the breakfast common room, switching from eloquent French to German to English and back, were turned out by the Kerschensteiner School for just that purpose.

The globalization of the travel industry has made the environment much more challenging for a hotel in Baiersbronn. There are no more trainloads full of steelworkers showing up in town; they can fly cheaply to Rome or London on easyJet or Ryanair instead. “We don’t have Alps or top winter-sports areas,” Bareiss said. “There’s no sea or beaches. Just a low mountain range.” As it has been for his mittelstand counterparts who make the tiny steering device rather than the car, the elevator motor rather than the skyscraper, specialization is necessary to stay at the forefront. The specialization, born of cutthroat competition with the Hotel Traube Tonbach, was gourmet cooking. Neither Wohlfahrt nor Lumpp was, so to speak, a free-agent signing out of Paris or Geneva; each was a product of the farm team, having worked his way up from apprentice to three-star chef. Now they are teaching the others their secrets.

The Bareiss and the Traube Tonbach have been locked in competition for more than six decades, but both sides seem to realize that the relationship is increasingly symbiotic. In an age of easy travel to so many exotic, more famous places, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the trouble to get to Stuttgart and then drive more than an hour into the deepest corners of the Black Forest to get to one three-star restaurant. But someone might make the effort to visit two. With the Hotel Sackmann and the Hotel Dollenberg, a guest could come for a weekend and have two three-star dinners and two lunches at starred restaurants. The region has entered a virtuous cycle, where little restaurants can also get fresh fish delivered twice a day. Who knows where the next star might come from?

On the other hand, there isn’t a concept binding the German restaurant scene together like molecular cooking or farm-to-table. There isn’t a unifying trend that everyone has to come here to try, just excellent cooking learned through an efficient system. I told Wilsch at the Kerschensteiner School that the stereotypical young chef in America is an art-school dropout washing dishes, then chopping onions and slowly revealing a knack for cooking.

“Creativity,” Wilsch immediately blurted out, approvingly. The haphazard development of young American cooks still appealed to him, the mystique of their self-made geniuses set against the technical mastery of his highly trained young craftspeople. There’s a different quality when “the chef is self-motivated,” he said, “not forced into fixed cupboards.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> Nicholas Kulish is the Times Berlin bureau chief and a novelist.