Gourmet Restaurant Le Pavillon

Bühler Zwetschge at the pass

Martin Herrmann plates Bühler Zwetschge as Chef at Gourmet Restaurant Le Pavillon in Bad Peterstal Griesbach, cooking the regional plum in red wine with sugar and spices before it reaches the room. The gesture is plain enough to read across the table: fruit, wine, sweetness, warm spice, then the discipline to stop before the fruit disappears. Chef Martin Herrmann gives his title with the same economy, head chef at Hotel Dollenberg, alongside his work as head chef of Le Pavillon and executive chef of Gourmet Restaurant Le Pavillon. The kitchen sits inside the Hotel Dollenberg world, a Relais & Châteaux house in the Black Forest, where Baden appetite meets the grammar of French haute cuisine. Herrmann’s lineage, as published by the house, is attached less to a named mentor than to a region and a method: Bühler plum, freshly caught trout, venison, classical sauce work, and the insistence that each plate keep its indispensable element legible. Le Pavillon opened in 1998, and the restaurant carries two Michelin stars in 2025. Those numbers matter because they frame a long station, not a sudden arrival.

Classic Baden under French structure

The program moves between Classic Baden cuisine and French structure, with Mediterranean flavours, Far Eastern accents, and international spices used as pressure rather than ornament. Herrmann’s named plates show the range without needing a thesis. Venison with Griess Knödel keeps game and dumpling close to regional appetite. Freshly caught trout brings the Black Forest landscape into the kitchen without turning it into scenery. Gänsestopfleber, Quitte, Joghurt und Brioche sets foie gras against quince, yogurt, and brioche, a sequence that belongs to the fine-dining register but still depends on acidity, fat, sweetness, and crumb. The menu is seasonal, with five- to eight-course tasting formats alongside set menu and à la carte service. In that span, Herrmann can move from a classic meat or fish course to a chocolate dessert plated with the pastry chef. The detail is small, and useful. It places the chef at the bench-side of the final course, working with another set of hands rather than leaving pastry as a distant station. The method here is not reduction in the culinary sense alone. It is reduction as editorial discipline, the search for the necessary seasoning and the ingredient that should remain readable after the plate has been built.

A quiet room above the Black Forest

The room carries the manners of a formal hotel dining room: white tablecloths, polished service, a quiet register, and views over the Black Forest hills. Nothing in that setting asks the kitchen to loosen its hand. If anything, it sharpens the frame. A plum cooked in red wine can look almost modest against glassware, linen, and the cadence of a tasting menu, but that is where Herrmann’s cooking makes its point. Baden material does not arrive as rustic quotation. It arrives measured, sauced, cut, and placed within the room’s calm. The room stays quiet enough for the pass to matter. Service moves around the plate rather than over it.

The dish that keeps the place grounded

Le Pavillon’s place in the Black Forest fine-dining map rests on the way Herrmann keeps local material inside classical technique without making either one decorative. The next plate does not need announcing in advance. The craft is Bühler Zwetschge, red wine, sugar, spices, and the hand that decides when the fruit has given enough.