WIf the seven-year-old son doesn’t want Legos or Playmobil for Christmas or a new football, but instead a cooking class with the country’s most famous chef, this is not a cause for concern for the legal guardians about possible behavioral problems, but a reason for joy. Little Yannick Noack’s parents saw it that way and sent him and his grandmother to Schloss Lerbach in Bergisch Gladbach to the three-star grandmaster Dieter Müller, who immediately attested to the child being the youngest participant of all time in his courses. It goes without saying that the tot’s career aspirations were rock-solid from that moment on. And there’s no question that the joy was immeasurable when the precocious connoisseur was able to start his apprenticeship at Lerbach Castle – albeit with Müller’s successor Nils Henkel. Since then, Yannick Noack has been moving happily and contentedly exclusively in the world of top-class cuisine, which proves that the desire to have children cannot be taken seriously enough.
Highly talented and still looking for the golden ratio: Yannick Noack, the young chef de cuisine at “Purs” in Andernach.
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Image: Sascha Perrone
22 years later, Noack places us on expansive white sofas in the lounge of his restaurant “Purs” in Andernach am Rhein, serves us the kitchen greetings and from the first second leaves not the slightest doubt that as a self-confessed Rhinelander he is not a child of sadness is, but likes to let it rip. The carrot triumvirate made from Vichy, chawanmushi and fine straw, the oxtail praline with forest mushroom consommé, beech mushrooms and celery, the little tower made from duck liver, eel, Brussels sprouts, quince, brik dough and a Danish croissant instead of the traditional brioche – that everything is not culinary chamber music, but just as lively a flourish of aromas as all the following dishes. Noack combines a pickled mackerel from the Vendée with a couscous salad, swedes and pimientos de padrón on a daring plate, in which the passion fruit broth brings a little harmony. And it’s just as wild with the fried carabinero, which has to do with shaved cashew nuts, a kumquat beurre blanc and lettuce as pesto and smoked praline including carabinero tartare, without really knowing what to do with his playmates should.
Gourmet restaurant and luxury boutique hotel: the chancellery in Andernach once belonged to the archbishops of Cologne, now it belongs to lovers of earthly pleasures.
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Image: Sascha Perrone
Such youthful impetuosity comes as no surprise to anyone given Yannick Noack’s rapid career. Immediately after his training, he spent two formative years just a handful of kilometers away with Joachim Wissler in the “Vendôme”, at the time Germany’s most innovative chef, whose unorthodox avant-gardism has shaped Noack to this day. With two and three Michelin stars, things went on seamlessly, with Christian Bau in Perl an der Mosel, Klaus Erfort in Saarbrücken and Christian Eckhardt, with whom he first worked at the stove in the Villa Rothschild near Frankfurt, and then as his sous-chef to follow to Andernach. For a few months he has been responsible for the kitchen of the “Purs”, for which Eckhardt has cooked two Michelin stars and similarly high ratings in all other restaurant guides – appropriate merits for this spectacular stage of culinary art, which was run by the Doetsch dynasty, a gourmet fanatic family of local Oil magnates, has been furnished with a lot of money and taste: The restaurant resides in the former office of the Archbishops of Cologne, a crooked baroque building with an adjoining Relais & Château luxury boutique hotel, which was designed by the famous Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt in an epoch-spanning interior design total work of art, in a bold mixture of traditional and contemporary, which Yannick Noack consistently emulates on his plates. He does not take the simple route of reducing the aromas and harmonizing the tastes, on the contrary: the young chef loves the spectacle, the challenge , the practice riotous and sometimes the excessive.
Epoch-spanning work of art: the well-known Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt furnished the “Purs”.
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Image: Sascha Perrone
He slices his calf paper-thin and marinates it, then pits it against lovage, pearl barley and a powerful soy sauce-poached egg for the ultimate concentration of flavor. After a week of aging in clarified butter, the guinea fowl is ready for a flavor wrestling match with fried Chinese cabbage, currant vinaigrette and Hokkaido squash puree. And the white truffle from Alba is the most daring. He takes on black pudding, walnut chips, fried kale and a poached quail egg, and that’s not all: we’re also given two sauces to experiment with, a kale vinaigrette and a truffle butter, and to decide for ourselves how we want to focus on the flavors put on the plate and move.
Provocation instead of routine, thoughtfulness instead of indifference, that’s what he wants to achieve with his kitchen, says Yannick Noack, who undoubtedly achieves his goal – but sometimes overshoots the goal when the provocative loses its plausibility, the unorthodox becomes incomprehensible and inventiveness leads to overambition . However, given his talent, it’s only a matter of time before he finds balance. And until then, he can rely on his pastry chef Sebastian Kraus, who will finish off with first Congolese Virunga chocolate with rosehip, rose water, a sourdough chip and green and red shiso and then a herb box with honeycomb, buckwheat, palm heart parfait and lavender Peach brew served without any spectacle in the “Purs” bar at one of Axel Vervoordt’s wonderful tables made from the venerable floorboards of an old Belgian mansion – which suddenly looks like a warning sign and seems to tell us that things are going to be good and beautiful has time to mature.