IInflation is usually a bogeyman in Germany, but this is a gift of luck: in the year the Wall came down, there were six Michelin stars in Berlin, which, with the hyperinflationary rate of increase of 416.67 percent, have meanwhile become 31 stars – which in turn puts an ambitious young chef ahead of the asks how he can stand out from his peers in the capital’s culinary shark tank.
She also drove the thirty-one-year-old Hamburger Yannic Stockhausen, who took over the kitchen of the “Cordo” in the highly gentrified Scheunenviertel in 2019, received a Michelin star the following year and was immediately locked away in the pandemic lockdown. His answer to the question was clear: with reflection. Stockhausen used the forced break to realize that he no longer wanted to cook the way he used to, but had to deal with the big picture, with the origin of his products and their ecological balance sheets, with the fallacy of the inexhaustibility of our resources and his own responsibility as a chef for the future of the planet – but that does not mean that in the “Cordo”, as in many other star restaurants in Berlin, a pure intellectual cuisine is served.
No child of sadness: Yannic Stockhausen, the head of the “Cordo”.
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Bild: Cord
Yannic Stockhausen, who with his tattoos and full hipster beard has also acclimatised himself to the center of Berlin, likes to be the muscle man, happily hits the drums of aromas and prefers to let the big orchestra of tastes play. As a triple kitchen greeting, he serves a crab tartlet with coffee and vanilla, a smoked eel profiterol with eel jelly and Wagyu on naan bread and rams the stakes in with it: There is no child of sadness standing at the stove, after all we are sitting too in the former “Cordobar”, which was a legendary and funny wine bar until the last syllable of the name was voluntarily renounced.
Off to flavor wrestling!
Immediately afterwards, the spectacle continues with a leek that is charred in the oven and then cut open in the middle with a scalpel. In the opening lie wild oysters from the Baltic Sea under leek cream, walnuts and oyster mayonnaise, which try with some effort to assert themselves against the overpowering smoke aromas – just like the trout, which are only gently pulled under the pass, but then from cheeky smoked almonds and a broad-shouldered aubergine cream is challenged to a flavor wrestling.
The desire to party loudly is the privilege of young people, which Yannic Stockhausen can still claim for himself, although he has experienced a lot in his career. He was already cooking for himself and his sister at the age of twelve because his mother had little time, learned all the basic techniques of good cooking in an ambitious Hamburg restaurant, trained first with the two-star chef Christoph Rüffer in the “Haerlin” on the Binnenalster, then with the three-star chef Sven Elverfeld in the “Aqua” in Wolfsburg, in between with a Ducasse student in Normandy familiarized himself with the innermost essence of haute cuisine and at the same time went extensively on culinary study trips around the world.