20 Best Restaurants In Germany

If you're wondering why this opulently furnished restaurant, with its winter garden and mountain terrace — located in the Residenz Heinz Winkler, a colorfully ornamented hotel southeast of Munich in the Bavarian Alps — is named for an Italian city... Well, owner-chef Winkler was actually born in Italy, in Brixen (or Bressanone), a city in the South Tyrol, German-speaking but part of Italy since after World War I. Winkler, who honed his craft in the kitchen of Paul Bocuse, nonetheless has made his career in Germany, where he became the youngest chef (and also the first Italian-born chef) ever to receive three Michelin stars, back in 1981. This was at the famous Tantris in Munich. In 1991, Winkler left the big city to open this mountain retreat. His cooking has lost none of its confident skill, though, as anyone who enjoys his foie gras with quince and pine nuts, mildly smoked sturgeon fillet with wasabi and char caviar, Bresse pigeon with violet mustard and almonds, or warm chocolate cake with rum cream and pickled cherries will discover.

Claus-Peter Lumpp's Michelin-three-star in the Black Forest serves Black Foresty-seeming fare, hearty and full of flavor. That might mean Alsatian quail with Savoy cabbage, chestnuts, and black-smoked bacon; fried scallops with pumpkin sauce and black chanterelles; or saddle of roe deer with blini, sharing a plate with braised venison shoulder with cauliflower purée.

All right, this isn't exactly a restaurant: It's a huge, always bustling, very traditional brewery — but how could you visit Munich, Germany's great beer capital, and not try this classic establishment? The beers are nonpareil and the food is just the kind of thing you want to eat with these impeccable brews: homemade obatzda cheese spread with chive bread, cold roast pork with freshly grated horseradish and sour pickles, grilled Nürnberg bratwurst with barrel-aged sauerkraut, homemade spätzle with mixed cheeses and crisp onions — even, if you're in the mood, grilled marinated steak with herb butter.

One of numerous restaurants at Frankfurt's luxurious Steigenberger Hof Hotel, this casually elegant Michelin-one-star may be (as its name suggests) French in inspiration, but Patrick Bittner's cooking mixes culinary cultures with energy and flair to produce a first-rate example of contemporary German cooking. Alsatian foie gras is enhanced with muesli, yogurt, and brioche crumbs; Icelandic char is given an earthy cast with baby turnips and smoked birch oil; good old American beefsteak comes with a romaine cream. Bittner's dining room is welcoming, with its century-old oak flooring, its handsome fireplace, and its French paintings on the walls, and the wine list here is first-class.

Chef Nils Henkel's watchwords are "nature" and "naturalness." He pays special attention to vegetables, uses herbs and spices (both Middle European and exotic), pays close attention to seasonality, and specializes in clean, concentrated flavors and novel textures. There is a Noma-like purity to his "cabbage and roots," with beets, beechnuts, and turnip tops, or his reinvention of Greek salad to include squid, red shrimp, and cucumber with sheep's milk yogurt. His combinations at Gourmetrestaurant Lerbach go further afield when he combines scallops with sea urchin, lettuce, and smoked pear, or duck liver with raspberries, macadamia nuts, and green peppers — and the breadth of his imagination may be seen with such dishes as roasted sea bass with smoked ox marrow, chives, cauliflower, and caviar, or Eifel lamb with pepper juice, celeriac ciabatta, and pine nut cream. This is imagination in the service of flavor.

This stylish establishment in central Berlin's Mitte district — home to the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Unter den Linden, Museum Island, and other city landmarks — merits a Michelin star for its savory cuisine, neither conventional nor avant-garde. Chef Kolja Kleeberg uses locally sourced ingredients whenever possible, and fashions them into such superb dishes as rabbit with lentils, marinated quince, and lamb's lettuce; quail with chickweed, pancetta, and radishes; velouté of Jerusalem artichoke with smoked mackerel and apples; crispy char with pumpkin, coriander, and kumquat; saddle of Brandenburg venison with cep cream, juniper sabayon, and clover; and sour cream soufflé and ice cream with elderberries. VAU's pan-European wine list is particularly noteworthy for a number of unusual German bottlings, among them Franz Keller Grauburgunder, Bernhard Huber Chardonnay, Weingut Amalienhof Riesling–Gewürztraminer Trocken, and Weingut Rings "Das Kleine Kreuz" Syrah from the Pfalz.

Joachim Wissler is Germany's chef of the moment — its "chef of chefs," according to an accolade given him by one hundred of his colleagues earlier this year. At his restaurant in the Althoff Grandhotel Schloss Bensberg, which occupies an 18^th-century hilltop castle just northeast of Cologne, he combines French and German flavors and techniques with an international flair. His mission, he has said, is both to provoke diners and to evoke past taste-memories in them. To achieve this, he anchors his imaginative creations with earthy, Germanic accents in dishes like trout with red-cabbage foam, ham gelatin with rose petals and chanterelles, a square of crisp-skin suckling pig cooked in the Spanish style combined with foie gras sautéed with soy sauce, a larger serving of young pork with a beer soufflé and puréed peas...

Mario Lohninger worked for his fellow Austrian Wolfgang Puck at Spago in Los Angeles and for Guy Savoy at his eponymous gastronomic shrine in Paris and then earned fans in New York City as executive chef at the now-defunct Danube. In 2004, he took his culinary talents to Frankfurt, where he opened an unusual restaurant called Silk Bed, where diners reclined on bed-like couches, inside the trendy Club Cocoon, and later a more conventional one called simply Lohninger. Silk Bed closed earlier this year, but Lohninger is going strong, serving a kind of modern Austrian cuisine with international accents — like salmon sashimi with cucumber and miso, moistened with pumpkin seed oil; mountain cheese ravioli with chanterelles; monkfish with baby eggplant, roasted tomato, and cumin; a classic wienerschnitzel with cucumber and potato salads and cranberries; and Valrhona chocolate soufflé with maple syrup ice.

Originally the preserve of one of the most famous of German chefs, Heinz Winkler, this opulent restaurant, with its over-the-top Asian-influenced décor (the phrase "tempe of gourmandize" occurs — as much because of the surroundings as because of the food), now merits two Michelin stars under the direction of chef Hans Haas. The vividly flavored, imaginative food includes such creations as veal terrine with carrots, pumpkin, and goose liver; confit skate with artichokes; Dover sole with roast Jerusalem artichokes; roasted langoustines with fennel ravioli; gratinéed saddle of lamb with favas and eggplant couscous; and elderflower soup and mousse with elderflower sorbet.

Housed in an 18^th-century building on this Saxon city's main square, this elegant modern-style restaurant offers beautifully presented, complex dishes of great refinement. Chef Thomas Bühner likes to work several variations on a single ingredient in his dishes. Try, for instance, his turbot, crab, and North Sea shrimp with yeast dumplings and broccoli two ways; his fricassée of Bresse chicken with rice and four kinds of peas; or his "head to tail" lamb, five different cuts cooked in different ways, moistened with miso cream. Those with a hearty appetite shouldn't miss Bühner's autumn special of saddle of venison with smoked beef marrow, boudin noir, beets, and ceps.