June

A city cook who moved to the lake

June stands on Seestraße in Übersee, a Chiemsee village, and it was founded by chef Rico Birndt as his own canvas after he made his name at Mural Farmhouse in Munich. The move was deliberate rather than incidental: he wanted a rural setting in which to carry out a philosophy of sustainability and seasonality properly, sourcing vegetables from the immediate region and beef from cows grazing ten kilometres away.

The concept puts vegetables at the centre and casts proteins as ensemble players. In Bavaria, where hearty traditional cooking is the default and the neighbouring village addresses are casual lakeside inns, that makes June the outlier. It is also positioned to be approachable, with a laid-back atmosphere and casual but consistently attentive service, offered as a model for how upscale rooms could behave.

Preservation as the working method

The kitchen's technical centre is preservation. Canning, curing and pickling extend the flavours of a short northern growing season across the year, and the house ferments its own shoyu, miso and garum. Those are long-horizon techniques, and they change what a seasonal kitchen means. Instead of chasing produce week by week, the brigade captures a peak and then draws on it, which requires planning months ahead and the discipline to make in June what will be served in February.

Root crops, mushrooms and grains sit alongside the vegetables, and the menu runs as a tasting sequence with a la carte available. Herbs come from the terrace garden, and composting closes the loop. Building fine dining on this material is harder than building it on protein, because vegetables offer less inherent richness and the cook has to construct depth through fermentation, roasting and reduction rather than find it ready-made.

Windows onto the lake, herbs on the terrace

The room is airy and contemporary, with expansive windows flooding it with natural light and an interior arranged to sit inside the lakeside landscape rather than against it. It is intimate in scale and quiet, and the register stays relaxed and welcoming while the service remains formal.

The herb garden on the terrace is visible from the dining areas, which makes the farm-to-table claim checkable from a table rather than asserted on a page. Service works by explanation, with the team walking guests through sourcing and method, and the atmosphere stays warm and very accessible. That combination, a quiet formal room that does not feel guarded, is what allows a vegetable-led tasting menu to be persuasive rather than didactic.

A star in the first guide

Recognition arrived quickly. June holds one Michelin star from the 2025 guide, along with fifteen points from Feinschmecker and sixteen and a half from Falstaff. For a rural restaurant only recently opened, that pace confirms the execution rather than the concept alone.

What holds it together is the strictness. Seasonality is not adjusted for convenience, the herbs are grown on site, the beef comes from ten kilometres away, and the ferments are made in house. The vegetables are the heart of the meal, and everything else in Übersee is arranged to make that literal.