DIE GOURMET STUBE im Gasthaus Hummel

A village inn with two kitchens

The station asks for restraint before display. Stefan Hummel is the chef and host of DIE GOURMET STUBE im Gasthaus Hummel in Duggendorf, where Bavarian innkeeping and a finer pass sit under the same roof. His training began at the Roter Hahn in Regensburg, then moved through Schloss Höfingen under Franz Feckl, Falconera with Johannes Wuhrer, and the Mettnaustube in Radolfzell before he came back to the family house and turned it into a dual-kitchen operation.

Gasthaus Hummel carries its own lineage. Alois Hummel, his grandfather, acquired the Wirtshaus in Wischenhofen in 1922, setting the family work in a small village north of Regensburg, in the Oberpfalz. Former stables became the Fenstersaal in 1982, with views over the Naabtal. Around the centenary, the old Gaststube opposite the kitchen became the younger, more elevated room. The Gourmet Stube is the ambitious arm of that property, separate from the traditional Alte Saal but not severed from it. The hand still reaches back to a Dorfgasthof.

Five courses from field and cellar habits

The method here is a fixed five-course progression, with the kitchen drawing its cues from the orchards, fields and woods around the family’s own farmland. Hummel has described walking through them as the way he finds a menu. The opening can be a potato blini with finely cut beef tartare and fresh grated black truffle, a small construction that depends on proportion rather than scale. Another course folds kimchi heat into pear and black salsify, using confit, gelee, creme and flame to let sweetness, acidity, spice and earth take their turns without becoming a demonstration.

The house’s more rustic instincts show in a bouillabaisse served from a cocotte, with fish, mussel, shrimp, leek, fennel and gratinated tomato working through the broth. It is maritime cooking in a landlocked village, but the gesture is not imported glamour. It is stock, roast, shell, vegetable and timing. Michael Bretter has been the sous-chef here for years, and the continuity shows in the way the fine pass and the Wirtshaus share one discipline: product first, then the hand. Hummel’s own pleasure in a slow Sunday Ochsenbraten belongs to the same argument.

The room beside the old inn

The room keeps its scale close. In Wischenhofen the approach is not urban theater; the Gasthaus sits in a village setting, and the Gourmet Stube works best when that quiet is allowed to remain. The interiors are plain and modern, cosy rather than sealed off, with wider spacing between tables than the room once carried.

Service moves in the same register. Stefanie Hummel runs the floor and chooses the wines, and the program supports the kitchen rather than competing with it, with greetings from the kitchen breaking up the fixed menu’s pacing. The house is listed in the Guide Michelin, Gault&Millau, the Varta-Führer, Gusto, Schlemmer-Atlas and Der Feinschmecker, but the older Bavarian rooms and the Fenstersaal are still next door. That adjacency gives the Gourmet Stube its pressure and its charm: the truffle blini reaches the table a few steps from a house shaped by the Naabtal and the 1922 Wirtshaus.