The story is alive.
With the murmur of the guests, she is just leaving the place that has been writing German kitchen history like no other for half a century in the guise of her bold inventor and emeritus majordomo.
Even at the age of 93 in Methuselah, Fritz Eichbauer is still a fiery gourmet and insists on appearing week after week for the ritual supper in the "Tantris", his creation, his legacy.
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Deputy head of the features section.
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And he can count himself lucky that after months of complete renovation and a glamorous reopening at the beginning of October, everything is new, but the essentials have remained the same.
Anything else would be tantamount to desecrating this sanctuary of good taste, which is the only place in the entire republic that can claim to be the cradle of the German culinary wonder.
The Eichbauer family invested millions in the modernization of the "Tantris" and hardly left one stone unturned.
Regular guests will immediately notice that the stairs at the bar have been moved, the kitchen has been enlarged by a third and the glass day wine cabinet has been placed in the middle of the dining room where Eckart Witzigmann once grilled his chicken and Heinz Winkler fished the lobster out of the basin.
But the spirit and the impression of "Tantris" have remained untouched, this daring mixture of hedonism and eclecticism in the psychedelic seventies orange, this culinary cosmos of exuberant aesthetics, in which sobriety and asceticism have no place - a work of the Swiss architect and Designer Justus Dahinden, which was initially derided as a "Fresskirche", has long been an architectural icon and has been a listed building since 2012.
The traditional grande cuisine of France
The Feng Shui vignettes and the large "Tantris" logo, under which Gunter Sachs had his regular table, are still there, as is the parade of Buddha statues, the round columns as quotes from Japanese temple architecture, the legendary winged animals made of lightweight concrete, Hybrid creatures between bull and ram, ox and dragon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, who cheekily stick out their tongues at the guests. Nothing would be easier and nothing more dangerous than to make this legacy a museum.
That is why Felix Eichbauer, the son of the patriarch and current owner of the "Tantris", decided to take a radical cut after the almost three decades of Hans Haas' era: With Matthias Hahn, Benjamin Chmura and Virginie Protat, he has a young triumvirate at the Cookers installed - thus creating the curiosity that after two Austrians and one South Tyrolean, for the first time in its fifty-year history, a German is the culinary leader in the legendary house, which is also more than ever a French restaurant.