A thousand dead lobsters are enough. This is what Philipp Kovacs decided after years of working day in, day out, transporting large crustaceans into the afterlife or into the saucepan. Now he no longer wanted to watch the lobsters fidget for minutes in boiling water, and he no longer wanted to worry about whether the best goods were in Brittany or Nova Scotia. So he used the forced break of the first lockdown to radically rearrange his kitchen. Since then he has been cooking according to the motto “Here and Now”, with the first catchphrase standing for regionality and the second for seasonality. And because Kovacs believes that many people feel the same way as he does, he has christened one of his three menus “Future”, which does without fish and meat entirely.
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Deputy head of the features section.
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However, Philipp Kovacs does not cook in a futuristic setting, but in a relic of the architectural horrors with which Germany messed itself up in the 1970s. His restaurant, which bears the name of the local top vineyard Goldberg, is housed in the Fellbacher Schwabenlandhalle, a soulless monstrosity made of exposed aggregate concrete and zinc sheet, and despite these devastating surroundings manages to spin a cozy cocoon made of cherry wood, ostrich leather, linen curtains and gold leaf columns. Here we can confidently look forward to the future of the "here and now", but first of all we are greeted by the kitchen with farewell greetings from the wide world of culinary art: The tartelette from Hamachi, Bonito, Finger Limes,the Japanese egg chawanmushi and the Japanese ginger myoga almost make us a little sad in view of the impending renunciation - but the dim sum immediately afterwards all the more confident. Because it is filled with the belly of a Swabian-Hällischen country pig and a Bavarian prawn, tastes like the exotic stepsister of a Swabian Maultasche and exemplarily shows that regionality does not necessarily have to end in provinciality.that regionality does not necessarily have to end in provinciality.that regionality does not necessarily have to end in provinciality.
This is exactly what Kovacs is about, who now purchases ninety percent of his goods from a radius of a hundred kilometers and at the same time does not impose any limits on the remaining ten percent - a pragmatic regionalism without the dogmatism of the Scandinavian Nova-Regio pioneers, which actually finds a way in the future could show. Should it be as finesse and harmonious as the smoked and braised celery with apple and mustard seed salad, cucumber stock, smoked yoghurt and miso from the Black Forest tastes, we are not afraid of it in any case. And if such a Black Forest sturgeon is served in this future, we will welcome you in a happy mood anyway: It is pickled in a paste of miso and sea asparagus, briefly scorched, bedded on a bed of tapioca, washed with sea asparagus foam,crowned by caviar and is so aromatic and full of life that it is more reminiscent of Vatican baroque than Württemberg concrete brutalism.