Hotel Traube Tonbach

A return to the same kitchen language

Florian Stolte sets contrast at the pass as Chef at Hotel Traube Tonbach in Baiersbronn, where Köhlerstube gives his cooking its frame. Florian Stolte first worked at the house in 2006, after a 2005 start at Harald Wohlfahrt Palazzo in Hamburg, then returned in 2011 as Souschef for Köhlerstube and Bauernstube. Since 2012, he has carried the Head Chef role at Hotel Traube Tonbach, with the house rather than a single season shaping the discipline.

That continuity matters in a place with long culinary memory. Harald Wohlfahrt entered Schwarzwaldstube as sous-chef in 1978, became head chef in 1980, and held that station until 2017. His grammar joined Black Forest produce to French technique: farm ingredients, controlled sauces, measured composition, each element asked to earn its place. His earlier training at Mönchs Waldhotel, the Meisterschule in Baden-Baden, and Alain Chapel gave structure to a kitchen instinct already tied to regional supply. Stolte’s work sits inside that same house culture, not by imitation, but by proximity to its habits: repetition, clean lines, and a refusal to let the plate become crowded.

Salmon trout, oyster, preserved cucumber

At Köhlerstube, Stolte’s named dishes read like a working method. Gently cooked salmon trout comes with Tarbourich oyster and preserved cucumber; fried lobster “surf&turf” meets juicy pork belly. The pairings are not ornamental. They set texture against salinity, clean fish cookery against acid, shellfish against the density of pork. The house does not need to explain the technique when the combinations show the hand.

Traube Tonbach gives that cooking a wider system. The hotel carries four Michelin-starred restaurants within a large Black Forest resort, and its wellness facilities span over 4,500 m², but the kitchen measure remains smaller: the cut, the sauce, the moment a protein leaves the heat. After the January 2020 fire destroyed Schwarzwaldstube, Köhlerstube, and Bauernstube, the family built Temporaire on the parking deck with kitchen containers, staff areas, refrigeration, and storage. Stars stayed with the work in March 2021. The reconstructed Schwarzwaldstube reopened in April 2022 with floor-to-ceiling windows over the valley, and the pass returned to permanent ground.

The house around the pass

The house began in 1789 and remains in the Finkbeiner family, a fact that shows less as nostalgia than as operational patience. There are 151 rooms, natural wood furnishings, quiet public rooms, and windows that hold the Tonbach Valley close without making scenery do the work of hospitality. The floor feels calm because the back of house carries pressure elsewhere.

In the restaurants, that pressure has a different sound: plates lifted, glass set down, the soft corrections that keep a room aligned. The Black Forest is present in timber, fir, mountain light, and the resort’s scale, but the more exact reading is at the station. Stolte’s salmon trout with Tarbourich oyster belongs to this house because it carries restraint through contrast, and because Köhlerstube has given him years to repeat the gesture.