Dhe very first guest of the new “Schwarzwaldstube” and its sister restaurants “Schatzhauser” and “1789” was Paul. Paul is six years old, will soon be in the second grade of primary school and is fortunate to be the son of Torsten Michel, a three-star chef and head of the “Schwarzwaldstuben”. Last Friday, like every Friday, Paul got off the school bus in front of the door of his father’s restaurant, inspected the new location very carefully, had two Maultaschen served and, according to eyewitness reports, was extremely satisfied with his meal. Then he went to play and left the three restaurants to the other premiere guests, who in the splendid top gastronomy of the Hotel Traube Tonbach in Baiersbronn, which had risen from the charred ruins, could experience for themselves how history is continued in a heart-blooded family business without repeating it or turning it into a museum.
Neither resignation nor melancholy
In the night of January 5, 2020, the “Schwarzwaldstube” and its outbuildings burned down to the foundations. A technical defect, as the State Criminal Police Office determined without a doubt, was the cause of the end of a story that began in 1789 with the first liquor license for the Finkbeiner family in the Tonbach valley. Over the course of two centuries, the tavern for charcoal burners and lumberjacks has grown into the epicenter of top German cuisine with the most traditional three-star restaurant in the republic, an amorphous building complex that has been repeatedly rebuilt, added on and added to and the oldest parts of which actually refer to the year of the French Revolution. Almost everything was gone after the fire, but neither Heiner and Renate Finkbeiner nor their two sons Matthias and Sebastian and certainly not Torsten Michel fell into resignation or melancholy. Instead, they quickly built a temporary retreat with the descriptive name “temporaire”, in which Michel again got three Michelin stars and Florian Stolte one star for his “Köhlerstube”. But that, too, has been history since last Friday.
Restraint is the top priority: Nothing could be further from the new building for the three gourmet restaurants of the Traube Tonbach than pomp or even ostentation.
:
Image: dpa
A three-part building was created exactly on the old site, which manages the balancing act of being neither a replica nor a foreign body, neither forgotten in history nor nostalgic and yet original and independent. Restraint and respect for the environment was the top priority of the Finkbeiners, who would never pose as valley kings and build a magnificent gourmet palace in the Tonbachtal – a modesty bordering on self-denial that might irritate some visitors who have traveled from far away, but that’s the way it is now in the pietistic Northern Black Forest. The gables are based on the neighboring buildings, the proportions avoid any conspicuous features, the facade is clad with the typical larch shingles of the Black Forest, which, thanks to their essential oils, are the most robust of all local woods. The floor is made of cobblestones in the foyer and Black Forest granite in the “Schwarzwaldstube”, the walls of the front are made of stuffed clay straw, an ancient local technique and at the same time the oldest form of construction known to mankind – all indications that this house was designed to last for centuries and its stones are said to have a lifespan like those of the Via Appia.