Restaurant Schwarzwaldstube

Restaurant Schwarzwaldstube Review at-a-glance

Awards: 3 michelin star, 19.5 gault millau

+Technically sound cooking with impeccably sourced ingredients

+You won’t find any cutting edge culinary trends at Schwarzwaldstube but you will get refined, well-edited dishes that are not surprising but delicious

-Pastry section did not live up to the standard set by the savory section

Rating: 94/100

Verdict: Some meals are greater than the sum of their parts. Individual dishes might not wow you but when you think back the overall meal does. For me, Schwarzwaldstube was the opposite of this - when I think back to each savory course they were world-class, 97 or 98 of 100 with no major missteps. Particularly memorable were the scallop, caviar and watercress dish, every bit as good as a similar variation at L’Ambroisie. Why not a higher score then? It could be a boring pastry section or an unexpectedly high bill (partly my fault, described in detail later), but I don’t remember thinking as highly of Schwarzwaldstube as the individual dishes would suggest I should.

Price I paid: €370 for the longest tasting menu & white truffle course

Value: 15/20

Restaurant Schwarzwaldstube Background

Schwarzwaldtube is arguably the most historic of the three stars in Germany, earning its third star back in 1992 under the steady hand of Harold Wohlfhart. Wohlfhart had a long career at Schwarzwaldstube, working at the restaurant for over 40 years before stepping down in 2017. The long-time sous chef Michel Tortsten took over without missing a beat, maintaining the three stars in his first year as head chef. What makes the restaurant so special is it has been a training ground for many chefs who have earned 3 stars in their own right including Christian Bau of Victors Fine Dining (arguably the best chef in Germany currently), Kevin Fehling of the Table, and Thomas Bühner of the now-shuttered La Vie. While I never had the pleasure of enjoying Wohlfhart’s cooking, I would cause Tortsten’s cuisine to follow a similar archetype - rooted in French tradition without being staid or dated. You won’t find any molecular gastronomy or shrubbery in your desserts here but you will find plenty of impeccably sourced products cooking precisely and paired with deep flavorful sauces.

The restaurant itself is in the Black Forest area of Germany which it is named after, part of the five star hotel Traube Tonbach. When I visited the dining room was in a traditional rustic German building with floor to ceiling windows overlooking a green valley. Sadly only a few months after I visited in early Dec19 the restaurant burned down due to a kitchen fire. After a short closure, the restaurant has reopened in a temporary dining room while they fully rebuild the kitchen and dining room.

Schwarzwaldstube offers three tasting menus, a shorter 5-course one priced at €195, 7-course menu at €245 and a vegetarian menu for €185. In addition to the the tasting menu, they offer a la carte menu with a handful of starters and main courses. Like most of Germany’s three stars, this gives you a pretty good bang for your buck when you consider the quality of cooking and what you would pay at a comparable place in the US or Paris.

That said, I do have to say my bill ended up quite a bit higher than expected as a result of some overzealous ordering on my part and lack of communication on the part of the server. First, I asked to swap a seafood dish from the short tasting menu (the signature Oyster, Scallop, Caviar) in place of the red mullet in the long tasting menu. This was no problem for the kitchen but came with a rather hefty, unmentioned surcharge (which they kindly took off). Compounding the issue asked if I could add an additional white truffle dish to the tasting menu, incorrectly assuming it would be a tasting portion. This was a costly assumption as I ended up with a full a la carte portion and a corresponding €100+ price tag. Lastly, I fell into the old trap of asking for a glass of red wine to go with the main course without specifying which and ended up with the sommelier’s choice which coincidentally was near the top end in the cost per glass list. Each of these individually could be explained away (and partly my fault) but, in the end, resulted in a surprisingly hefty bill and left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

What we ate at Restaurant Schwarzwaldtsube

The meal kicked off with a trio of one bite amuses on spoons including a pommerian beef tartar, gilt head bream on a crisp, and a bit of cauliflower paired with roe. These were all excellent with the beef tartar being the best of set. A good start from Chef Michael Tortsen. This was followed by a more substantial amuse bouche pictured above featuring intricately layered beetroot and horseradish cream with a generous ring of imperial caviar. This was a real treat. Amuses can be an afterthought in many restaurants but that was not the case here with this bite featuring more caviar than most tasting menus pack into the entire meal. The use of horseradish was particularly impressive, the powerful root being well-judged and restrained so as not to be too sharp.

Faroese salmon with duck barnacles and razor clams, wasabi, green cucumber and seaweed with Shoyu vinaigrette was a nice light start to the meal and featuring some truly incredible quality salmon from the Faroe Islands. Salmon is not the sexiest thing for a three-star to serve but this was excellent quality salmon indeed. The flavors of this dish were familiar but inviting, a good start to the meal if not the most memorable one.

I am a sucker for foie gras so the restaurant could not go wrong with Duck liver with roasted fall trumpets and chanterelles paired with light forest mushroom sauce with duck liver. The duck liver was perfect, cooked in a steam bath to just set and then giving a hard sear on the plancha - the end result being a great crispy exterior but a silky, almost liquid interior of the foie gras. If I was to quibble, the dish may have been a tad over seasoned and could have used some more acid to offset the richness of it all. That said, it was a great example of what a foie gras can be.

It was white truffle season so I added a dish off the a la carte that featured the famous mushroom, steamed medallions of Bretonian lobster with sepia risotto and crustacean oil, light nantua foam, alba white turffle. The lobster was a tad firm for my taste but the risotto was glorious, creamy, and deeply flavored from tossing it in the lobster coral. The white truffles were at the of the season (this was the first week of December) but were as fragrant as ever. Unrelated to how it tasted, I had assumed since I was adding this as a supplement to the tasting menu they would modify the size of the dish and its price from the a la carte menu. This was turned out to be a pricey assumption on my part as that was not the case as the dish rang in near €100.

Roasted scallops and poached Gillardeau oysters with imperial caviar, watercress emulsion, and oyster sauce with champagne is one of the signatures of Schwarzwaldtube and so I had to swap it in to the tasting menu in lieu of the red mullet course. A sublime dish once the watercress sauce was mixed in, intensely briny but in the best possible way. The scallops from Brittany were top-notch, miles better than the ones I had at three-star L’Assitte Champion a few months earlier. L’Ambroisie, arguably the pinnacle of french fine dining, has a similar dish that combines scallops, watercress, and caviar. While the flavor profile of this dish was very different, it was every bit the equal of the variant at L’Ambroisie.

Given the Black Forest setting, the main course was approriately a roasted back hare from Burgerland with Timut pepper, fine cream of black pudding, boudin noir and juniper just with cranberries. Another tour de force from the kitchen and the logical conclusion to the savory section of the menu. Nice rare hare with a a flavorsome sauce that had a nice level of spice from the juniper and cranberries. A fitting main course for winter that was lifted up by the gently spiced sauce.

Stuffed from the extra white truffle course, I skipped cheese and went directly to dessert. Unfortuantly, the pastry section did not quite maintain the same standard as the savory section. I can’t find anything particularly bad about the desserts but they failed to provide much excitment either through surprising combinations or reinterpretations of familiars flavors. Gala apple taste tartin with vanilla caramel and seabuck thorn sorbet was up first and fine enough. There was plenty of technical skill on display in this dish but in the end I couldn’t say it changed apple tartins for me. Comparisons between this apple dessert and similar variations at Restaurant Bareiss (which also used Sea Buckthorn) and Waldhotel Sonnara were not favorable ones. Last was a Fine Opaline with sour cherry sorbet and mousseline of black cherries, cherry brandy bonbon, and manjari chocolate which again displayed a good deal of skill (the thin sugar shell was particularly impressive) but didn’t pack enough pronounced flavors to really move the needle. Perhaps I was too full but I failed to really appreciate either dessert. The meal then concluded with a good selection of well made petit fours although it was quite a bit behind the offering at Restaurant Bareiss.