There is probably no other German city where you can enjoy life as easily as in Freiburg, this stronghold of cultivated carpe diem.
The fabulous Producer's Market at the Münster alone gives food lovers a daily feast of joy, and the best hour is when people gather for an aperitif in front of the wine shops and delicatessens, take off their shoes, cool their feet in the narrow canals of the old town and with a glass and Bites in hand that turn sidewalks into impromptu bars.
Savoire-vivre at the highest level
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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This is savoir-vivre at the highest level.
But they don't go out to eat in the same high class afterwards, because there is currently not a single restaurant in the gourmet city of Freiburg with a Michelin star - a typical phenomenon in a country where high cuisine and the art of living are still not born lovers.
But now a man wants to change that, who can't do anything else because he doesn't know anything else from his home country and hasn't done anything else in his whole life.
Martin Fauster comes from Styria, as the son of a farmer and butcher, he ate excellent food from an early age and knew at the age of fifteen that he would find happiness in the kitchen.
When he came into contact with haute cuisine one day in a luxury hotel in Vienna, it was all over for him and from then on he only cooked where the stars were shining.
He survived tough years of apprenticeship with Alfons Schuhbeck in Upper Bavaria, learned to love the inhabitants of the sea with Olivier Roellinger in Brittany, spent a formative time with Hans Haas at "Tantris" in Munich and then stayed a few kilometers away at "Königshof" for fourteen years. its own Michelin star.
Since it closed, he has lived in Freiburg, his wife's homeland, and since February he has been the head of the "Wolfshöhle", a three-hundred-year-old, long-standing traditional house right behind the Minster, named after the Isegrims, who once made the nearby Schlossberg unsafe .
We already know from the kitchen greetings that the fierce wrought-iron wolf on the facade should howl at the stars again as soon as possible.
An octopus tartare is served as a cold bowl with buttermilk, avocado cream and curry oil in the finest doses - this term is anything but antiquated for an Austrian traditionalist like Fauster -, a goose liver cream cleverly contrasted with turnips, radishes, radishes and rounded off with candied ginger, two small kitchen works of art that no appetizer from the cooling channel can compete with.
How good can life taste?
They are the start of a menu that merges classic haute cuisine with the culinary heritage of the Habsburgs, completely avoiding fashionable capers or garish exoticism, even if the basic products had a long journey.
The yellowtail mackerel, for example, is marinated raw and so incredibly tender that it would make any sushi grandmaster happy, and then as an entourage wisely content yourself with an onion royale, pearl onion chutney and sesame mayonnaise.
And the langoustines, freshly delivered, which leads to a spontaneous menu change, Fauster simply cooks in the carcass, drizzles them with langoustine mayonnaise and cannot deny that he learned his life lesson from Hans Haas, the Masters of artistic simplicity.