2024-01-12 15:30:44
As in the star kitchen, the employee motivation is prepared twice with plenty of root vegetables and marrow bones, simmered for days, then reduced to a highly concentrated jus and poured into a fillet of Wellington that has been wrapped with the greatest care in its puff pastry. The incentive measures are served as pasta and risotto, one of course fresh and handmade, the other brought to the plate à la minute and à point. And the bonuses for the employees are paid out in generous portions of Osietra caviar and winter truffles.
Jakob Strobel and Serra
Responsible editor of the travel magazine, deputy head of the features section.
That sounds like the fairy tale of the working people’s land of milk and honey, far too good to be true. But it is the delicate reality that takes place every weekday in the canteen of the Stuttgart software company Vector, and that is how it happened.
The happiness of good taste
As an ardent gourmet, one of Vector’s managing directors is a regular guest at the Hotel Traube Tonbach in Baiersbronn, which enjoys legendary status in Germany’s culinary cultural landscape, and not just because of Torsten Michel’s three-star restaurant “Schwarzwaldstube”. Seven years ago, the software entrepreneur asked his hosts if they would like to run his canteen. He could afford it because Vector, which like Microsoft was founded in a garage, now equips almost every car in the world with control electronics, generates billions in sales and has 2,500 employees in Stuttgart alone.
The Finkbeiner family hesitated for a moment and then set about squaring the circle: a canteen in which food is cooked according to the standards of top gastronomy and which gives 1,500 employees the happiness of good taste every day – not just out of altruism, but also out of calculation, because the management of Vector is firmly convinced that satisfied employees work far better than those who are happily fed.
A nice option for canteen currywurst: veal fillet in a crepe coating with tomato pesto foam, zucchini and zucchini flowers. : Image: Mirco Moskopp Vector Kantine by Traube Tonbach
The canteen is organized like a huge top restaurant, with a kitchen director and a restaurant manager, who is called “host” here, with a chef and three sous chefs, 22 cooks, ten dishwashers, ten kitchen assistants and three pastry chefs who work in a classic post kitchen and serve food transformed into a pass during opening hours – nothing is scooped out of bucket-sized pots with a ladle, but rather plate by plate is arranged with lots of effort from freshly prepared ingredients, with the use of goods being a credit to any star restaurant.
The delicatessen dealer Rungis comes by regularly, the pork comes from the best Swabian-Hallish breeders, carabinero and vintage sardines are regulars on the menu, and salmon and poultry are usually available in Label Rouge quality. And the whole thing is decorated with such attention to detail with flowers and buds, foam and hips that every lunch break becomes a tasting – to which Torsten Michel also contributes a recipe every now and then.
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