Our cooking looks for what connects. It opens a journey between today and yesterday, with new nuances and aromas that melt into a single dish and wake the whole range of Pannonian flavour.
OUR
PHILOSOPHY
Some restaurants cook regional. We cook Pannonian. Pannonia is a landscape that ignores borders. Hungary is closer than Vienna. The lake is closer than anything else. We were here long before there was a name for it.
NOT EVERYTHING GOOD IS NEW.
We were foraging wild herbs before it had a name. We poured natural wines while the rest of the country was sticking medals on bottles. We served on hand-thrown ceramics because porcelain was too smooth for us.
Today everyone talks about provenance, craft, produce. So do we – for forty years. Only more quietly.
We cook Pannonian, but we are not provincial. Alain is from Alsace. We learned natural wine in Friuli, from Joško Gravner, before the word arrived here. The ideas come from elsewhere. The produce comes from here. That is not a contradiction. That is what Europe means to us.
A FAMILY BUSINESS
SINCE 1984
Walter and Eveline started this house. He cooked without training and was named Chef of the Year six years later. She was the first female sommelière in Austria. The press called when they wanted to know about fashion. Or politics. We run the house now – Alain and I. Walter and Eveline have moved on to the Villa Valter in Lovran. My sister Stephanie makes the wine at Gut Oggau. The story isn't over. It's just happening in more places at once.
