Gabelspiel

Faux Gras as a first argument

Faux Gras opens the tasting menu at Gabelspiel in Munich, a vegetarian reading of duck liver that Florian Berger sends out with a delicate waffle beside it. Berger owns the house with his wife Sabrina and has led the kitchen since at least 2017. Curiosity is held under control here, and risk only earns its place when the dish still keeps its shape. The other plates named again and again, Herb Explosion, Cauliflower, So a Kas, read like positions taken at the bench rather than menu copy: vegetables carrying a course on their own weight, precise plating, and a house line that no combination is too daring.

That language sits inside a tasting-menu restaurant in Obergiesing-Fasangarten, a neighborhood more often described through everyday eating than through fine dining ritual. The house carries one Michelin star and keeps its scale intimate, which matters for this kind of work. A small room lets the kitchen send a plate while it is still close to the hands that made it; it also makes any slackness visible. A Giesinger Brotzeit sits on the same menu as the French refinement, which is the clearest signal of how the room wants to be read.

French technique with room for collision

The kitchen’s method leans on refined French technique, then loosens the frame with German and global references. The tasting menu is the structure, not a supplement to an à la carte card, and the rhythm gives the kitchen space to move from vegetable-led plates into richer, stranger combinations. Faux Gras carries the clearest statement: the luxury cue remains, but the material changes. Asparagus Burrata, Herb Explosion, Cauliflower, and So a Kas have all been singled out as plates where the kitchen’s vegetable work does more than support the protein.

Measurement here comes through repeatable decisions on the pass: a sauce reduced until it can carry Wagyu Gyoza without flattening it, miso purée placed as counterweight, a non-alcoholic pairing built to lift Karfiol rather than imitate wine. Gabelspiel’s beverage program is part of the craft, not an afterthought. Wine pairings are curated, and the zero-proof side has its own grammar, course by course, with drinks designed around the food rather than poured beside it. That matters in a menu where contrast is a working method, and it is part of why the house holds two red toques from Gault&Millau alongside the star.

A small room in Giesing

The room keeps the formality low enough for the food to stay audible. Warm lighting, quiet conversation, and an intimate layout give Gabelspiel the feel of a neighborhood room that learned the grammar of a starred kitchen without adopting its stiffness. The design is puristic and private, with a terrace that extends the scale rather than changing the mood. Nothing about the setting asks the guest to whisper. It asks them to pay attention.

That attention moves both ways. Sabrina Berger holds the floor while her husband holds the pass, and the wine side is folded into the same house rhythm as the kitchen. The restaurant’s position between Grünwalder Stadion and Tegernseer Landstraße gives the work an urban edge; the plates may draw on French technique and market inspirations from elsewhere, but the room remains grounded in Giesing. At Gabelspiel, the plate settles the case: combinations that look risky at the pass, then arrive resolved enough to feel inevitable.