Even though Pastor Emanuel Felke was professionally concerned with eternal life, he did not want to familiarize his followers with it unnecessarily early, but also wanted to make their earthly existence as long-lasting as possible.
That is why he devoted himself not only to pastoral care, but also to health care and developed a homeopathic cure that consists of a lot of sport, little food and regular healing mud baths and still bears his name today.
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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In Bad Sobernheim an der Nahe he founded a spa with the descriptive name Jungborn, gathered a loyal community of disciples around him and left his descendants a beautiful legacy.
They turned the facility into a spacious wellness hotel called Bollants, which not only includes earthen holes on the Naheufer for clay mud applications, but also the gourmet restaurant "Jungborn".
There, the guests like to end their strict Felke fasting cures in the glow of a Michelin star, without pondering whether the brave pastor could turn around in heaven at the sight of their blasphemous actions.
The sudden love of popcorn
After her castration of herbal tea in the sandstone vault of the restaurant, the kitchen greets her with a Diel winemaker's sparkling wine, which has been on the yeast for ten years like a prestige champagne, and then with four temptations that you wouldn't want to resist even without a fasting cure: a mushroom essence with mushroom candy in filo pastry, a linseed cracker with oxalis and Jerusalem artichoke, North Sea shrimp with salted lemon and celery and smoked eel with pumpernickel, quail egg and avocado cream.
Now you are ready to say goodbye to the strict vegetarianism of the "clay priest" with a duck liver thaler.
It's atop a thin sheet of Baumkuchen, clad in a port jelly topping and topped with a dumpling of corn sherbet, while port pearls, chickweed, grilled corn and popcorn – of all things that hideous rustling popcorn stuff known as regular cinema-goer has learned to genuinely hate, but in this course has come to appreciate as the ideal contrast to the soft duck liver.
There is no brioche with the liver, which together with the unusual ingredient of corn is a sure sign that in the "Jungborn" there can be a traditionalist at the stove, but not a culinary revanchist.
And Philipp Helzle makes no secret of the fact that one of the greatest advocates of culinary classicism in top German cuisine was his most important teacher.
Since an internship with a former sous chef of the three-star legend Dieter Müller, he knew what life had in store for him, completed his training there, then went to Sven Elverfeld in Wolfsburg and then to Claus-Peter Lumpp in the "Bareiss". – in order to take its aromatic opulence from grande cuisine as a model from now on.
After a few years in the Palatinate, he came to the "Jungborn" in 2013, took over the managerial post in 2020 and promptly defended the Michelin star.