Thirty years ago it was cooked in the Alps, today you cook the Alps.
In 1992, the "Alpine Initiative" vented its displeasure at the imminent destruction of the natural and cultural Alpine environment through transit traffic and mass tourism in a collection of "Alpine Recipes" from Ljubljana to Nice under the ambiguous title "It's Cooking in the Alps", with which one wanted to meet the "almost-bu(e)angers" "curatively", according to the foreword.
At the end of 2020, Norbert Niederkofler's retrospective was published in book form under the programmatic title "Cook the Mountain": Since 2013, the top chef in the South Tyrolean mountain village of Sankt Kassian has limited his cuisine to what flora and fauna produce at 1,500 meters above sea level, and received his in November 2017 for this third Michelin star.
Niederkofler may still be a solitaire with its regional cuisine that has been taken to the extreme, but meanwhile it finds itself in a steadily growing company.
More and more of his colleagues say goodbye to the usual everyday haute cuisine with its canon of well-travelled "noble products" and rely on regionality.
What was still on the defensive thirty years ago is now a culinary trademark with the same radiance that René Redzepi's New Nordic Cuisine had in the 2010s.
Regional excellence
The initiator and standard-bearer of the movement is the Swiss journalist and food scout Dominik Flammer, who in 2012 organized an inventory of almost forgotten autochthonous cultivated plants and disappearing farm animal breeds under the title "The culinary heritage of the Alps" and also put the producers of local delicacies in the spotlight: Farmers, shepherds, cheesemakers, butchers, fishermen, oil and grain millers, beekeepers .
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Two years later, again with Sylvan Müller, he published the results of his seven years of research in a handy guide with a comprehensive list of suppliers: the "Encyclopedia of Alpine Delicacies" from Aargauer Rüeblitorte to Zuger Rötel.
In Austria, people have been relying on the power of regional cuisine for a long time.
The driving force here is the four-toque chef Andreas Döllerer from Golling in Salzburg's Tennengau, who had the designation "Cuisine Alpine" trademarked in 2009.
He also provides the testimonial of the program document "Quintessenz", in which the Salzburg Tourist Association describes "Alpine cuisine" as a "comprehensive strategic approach" in order to "appreciate the regional excellence in the areas of agriculture, gastronomy, the hotel industry and the gourmet trade in a public way".