One Tiny German Town, Seven Big Michelin Stars

Peter Granser for The New York Times

Baiersbronn, a small town in Germany's Black Forest.

It was Saturday night at Restaurant Bareiss, an eight-table dining room in Baiersbronn, a small town in Germany's Black Forest, and the chef, Claus-Peter Lumpp, needed seven orders of John Dory in garam masala. Three line cooks darted around him, fussing over black plates laid out on a checkered towel under a heating lamp, saucing and garnishing and somehow not running into one another. Germany was not, until very recently, known for its chefs, but it does have a well-earned reputation for quality control. Chefs used syringes to deliver pinpoint droplets of sauce and tested temperatures with yellow electric thermometers that looked like Geiger counters. The bulk of the cooking takes place on nine electric burners that were made to Lumpp's exact specifications.

Sow's Stomach, Anyone?

A sampling of Germany's less-than-glorious culinary past.

Peter Granser for The New York Times

From top: Plating a seafood salad with truffle vinaigrette at the Hotel Traube Tonbach; coquille St. Jacques at the Hotel Sackmann; vacherin with Granny Smiths at Restaurant Bareiss.

"Ten seconds," Lumpp announced, loudly enough to be heard over the Pacojet machine that was micro-puréeing rhubarb ice cream.

"Jawohl!" his team answered in unison, as they prepared the sugar snaps and chickpea crème. Otherwise, the kitchen was bereft of conversation. As a rule, Lumpp doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to: during the entire Saturday-evening service, the only misfire was a wasted langoustine. Lumpp poked it with a knife and scrunched his face ever so slightly. When he turned around, Philipp Prinzbach, a 22-year-old line cook, flung the shellfish into the trash.

"The consistency was mushy," Prinzbach would tell me the next day. But Lumpp, expressing his cooperative approach, praised the young cook for coming up with the idea of the langoustine dish in the first place. "The old authoritarian model won't work anymore," Lumpp, who is 49, explained, when I asked him about his kitchen management style.

Wolfgang Puck, whose mother was a hotel chef in Austria, started training as a chef when he was 14. Lumpp, who earned a coveted third star in the 2008 Michelin guide, had other plans. "My dream job was auto mechanic," he says. He loved motocross racing and tinkering with moped engines and assumed that he would end up working in a garage. He enjoyed shop class, particularly making a chessboard and a copper bowl.

Lumpp's culinary ascent began with the simple urge to drop out of high school around the time of his 16th birthday. His widowed mother had remarried, and the family moved to another town. Everything felt off: the new school, the new people. His mother gave him permission to leave school, but only if he found an apprenticeship. So Lumpp went to a nearby job center run by the government and asked the career counselor which field had the most positions available. Germany is famous for its vocational education. The country's duale ausbildung, or "dual-training system," combines apprenticeship in the workplace with rigorous lessons at state-run schools. Lumpp became an apprentice in the kitchen at the Hotel Bareiss. After his military service (spent as the chef at an officers' club in Karlsruhe) and a short, unhappy stay in Düsseldorf, he returned to the Bareiss. With the exception of a year interning in three-star kitchens across Europe, including Alain Ducasse's in Monte Carlo, he has remained there since.

Baiersbronn has a population of only about 16,000, but it is quite large in area, a little over 73 square miles in the state of Baden-Württemberg, more than four-fifths of it covered with woods. It is not one of Germany's picturesque medieval towns, like Bamberg or Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which Walt Disney used as the model for Pinocchio's village. Here, clusters of houses, with tile roofs and wooden shingles that look like fish scales, dot the hillsides. Down along the Murg River, sawmills and woodworking factories are still in operation, with their piles of logs and forklifts. The region as a whole is known for its large number of entrepreneurial businesses, and several of Germany's medium-size family-owned enterprises make their home here, like Müller Mitteltal, which custom-builds heavy-duty trailers and whose factory sits at the bottom of the hill below the Bareiss.

But Baiersbronn is now on its way to becoming recognized as the world's most unexpected restaurant capital. The Bareiss's rival, the Schwarzwaldstube, at the Hotel Traube Tonbach, also has three Michelin stars, giving this isolated municipality the same number of three-star restaurants as London and twice as many as Chicago. The town is also home to a one-star Michelin restaurant at the Hotel Sackmann. Only a 30-minute drive away in Bad Peterstal-Griesbach is a two-star restaurant at the Hotel Dollenberg. To put all this in perspective, consider that Poland has a single restaurant with one Michelin star and none with two or three.

Nicholas Kulish is the Times Berlin bureau chief and a novelist.

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