The Frankfurt we’ve been missing

EBRU ERKE

For many of us, Frankfurt has long conjured up trade fairs, business trips, skyscrapers, banks and one of Europe’s most important aviation hubs, its vast international airport. If we had a few days to spend in Germany, we would think of Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, but rarely Frankfurt. This time, having had the chance to explore the city more deeply and in expert hands, I realized how much we had underestimated it.

The museums are the first indication. Frankfurt’s cultural network, known as Museumsufer, or Museum Embankment, now encompasses 39 museums and exhibition venues. The Städel Museum alone is reason enough to devote time to the city. Founded in 1815, its collection spans more than 700 years of art history, from the Middle Ages to the present day, with works ranging from Botticelli, Dürer, Rembrandt and Vermeer to Monet, Picasso, Bacon and Gerhard Richter.

But for me, the real surprise began at the table. What makes Frankfurt’s gastronomic scene interesting is not simply that it has good restaurants. It is the fact that, in one of Europe’s financial centres, radically different culinary philosophies can coexist with such confidence. On my most recent trip, I experienced this through three restaurants. One pursues a new generation of luxury built on impeccable technique, another seeks to reinterpret German cuisine in a contemporary language, while the third embraces a notion of locality so radical that even olive oil and black pepper are excluded from its kitchen. All three belong to the world of fine dining, yet their interpretations of what fine dining should be could hardly be more different.

My first stop was The Dune by Niclas Nussbaumer. The restaurant’s story itself reflects the transformation Frankfurt is undergoing. The property that the city knew for many years as Villa Kennedy reopened as The Florentin under the Althoff Collection following an extensive transformation. Its fine-dining restaurant, The Dune, earned two Michelin stars only months after opening.

At the helm is Niclas Nussbaumer, still only 32, alongside Lea Rupp, who oversees the restaurant’s service and hospitality. The world they have created retains the discipline of classical fine dining while leaving behind as much as possible of its old sense of distance and formality. What first struck me about Nussbaumer’s cooking was its clarity rather than its showmanship. The technique is formidable, but it never pushes the ingredient out of the spotlight merely to announce itself. Different parts of the same ingredient reappear at various stages of the menu, reflecting a philosophy of using a product as completely as possible. The sauces, however, are for me the greatest strength of his cooking. Despite their intensity, they never feel heavy. They are concentrated, clean and remarkably precise in flavor.

The Dune actually offers two distinct ways of dining. Alongside the tasting menu, which presents the chef’s cuisine as a complete narrative, there is a more social experience built around sharing. I found this distinction significant because it addresses one of the central questions fine dining has been grappling with in recent years: How do you preserve perfection while reducing formality? Can you create a truly elevated gastronomic experience without placing guests inside a three- or four-hour ritual governed by rules? The Dune’s answer is clear: Luxury is no longer simply about flawless service. It is also about creating a space in which people can genuinely feel at ease.

My second compelling encounter in Frankfurt was Rausch, where the story took a different turn. Jochim Busch spent a decade at the helm of Gustav, leading the restaurant to two Michelin stars during his final five years there. Philipp Günther, meanwhile, has spent many years on the hospitality side of the restaurant world. When the two longtime friends decided to open their own restaurant in June 2025, they brought the full weight of their experience with them, but created a restaurant that never feels burdened by it.

You sense this as soon as you enter Rausch. The entrance leads you directly into the kitchen. Perhaps the best way to describe Busch’s cooking is through the idea of “familiar flavours.” Rather than rejecting the memory of German cuisine, he reconstructs it through contemporary technique and aesthetics.Regionality and seasonality matter, but he does not turn either into an ideology that confines his cooking. Vegetables can take centre stage, while a classic German flavour may return in an entirely different technical form. Beetroot intensified by removing some of its water, or trout explored through different textures and techniques, are examples of this approach.

At the third restaurant, Seven Swans, we moved beyond the question of what makes a “good restaurant” and entered the territory of something closer to a gastronomic manifesto. Ricky Saward’s cuisine is entirely plant-based. Yet what makes Seven Swans fascinating is not the fact that it is vegan. There are excellent vegan restaurants in many parts of the world today. What matters here is how far Saward is prepared to push the very idea of locality. There is no olive oil in his kitchen. No black pepper. Simply because neither grows around Frankfurt.

At first, this may sound like a somewhat theatrical rule. But once you understand the system behind the restaurant, you realise that the idea runs much deeper. A significant proportion of Seven Swans’ produce comes from the Braumannswiesen permaculture garden in the Taunus Mountains, where hundreds of varieties of vegetables, fruits and herbs are grown. Saward and his team go even further, foraging along the Main River and in nearby forests for wild herbs, leaves, buds and fruits.

And in a sense, it is nature rather than the chef that writes the menu. One sentence Saward uses to explain his approach captures it perfectly: What they plant today determines the menu for the months ahead, while what they pick today determines the menu for tonight.

Rather than limiting creativity, these restrictions seem to intensify it. Potatoes are cooked in the earth; their juice becomes a crisp element, their charred skins are transformed into an intensely flavoured liquid, and the dish is finished with fermented oak leaves. Summer produce is fermented, pickled and dried to carry it through the winter months. It is not only the familiar edible part of a plant that becomes an ingredient, but its roots, leaves, stems, buds and, at times, even its bark.

Even the non alcoholic pairings are an extension of the same philosophy. Drinks made from fermented vegetables, wild plants, leaves, buds and tree bark are served alongside the menu. In other words, rather than simply buying beverages from elsewhere, they attempt to create even the drinks from the geography in which the restaurant exists.

And I find it fascinating that all of this is happening in the heart of Frankfurt, one of Europe’s most important financial centers. Just a few kilometres away, billions of euros are changing hands in skyscrapers, while in a tiny 16-seat restaurant a chef is heading into the forest, thinking about which wild leaf will find its way onto a plate that evening. Perhaps it is precisely this contrast that makes Frankfurt so interesting.