Kamin- und Bauernstube

A stube working by restraint

With the trout, Martin Herrmann at Kamin- und Bauernstube in Bad Peterstal brings a steady hand to a Black Forest room where regional cooking carries the service, Badische in its frame and refined in its finish. Herrmann is executive chef for this room and for the two-Michelin-starred Le Pavillon on the same site, and his whole career has been made here: born in Haslach im Schwarzwald in 1966, apprenticed at Hotel Dollenberg from 1982, commis de cuisine from 1985, chef de cuisine since 1991. The house belongs to Hotel Dollenberg, a five-star Relais & Châteaux property in the Renchtal valley, and this restaurant functions as its more accessible regional table. The kitchen states its own brief as regional feingemacht, refined regional cooking, a narrower promise than reinvention and a harder one to keep across every service. The name covers two rooms rather than one, the rustic Bauernstube and the fireside Kaminstube, with a terrace beyond them. What a reader can feel here is not a roll call of mentors but a method: Baden ingredients, traditional structures, and the patience to keep the plate grounded.

Badische cooking, held close to the source

The program turns on choice rather than spectacle: à la carte cooking, set menus, a changing weekly menu, and dishes made for the table to share. Renchtäler Black Forest trout gives the kitchen its clearest local measure. Chateaubriand gives the room another register, more classical, more communal, still within the same rustic-elegant grammar. The cooking is described by the house through regional refinement, not reinvention. That distinction matters. Sauces, fish, roasts, vegetables, and the rhythm of a hotel dining room all need control, especially when the same kitchen culture must serve both guests who want a familiar Baden meal and those arriving with the expectations that follow Hotel Dollenberg’s culinary reputation. The wine program is curated rather than loudly encyclopedic, meant to sit beside trout, beef, and seasonal Baden dishes without pulling the table away from the plate. The list is shared with the hotel’s fine-dining room, which gives a Bib Gourmand table more cellar than it would otherwise carry. Kamin- und Bauernstube holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a Schlemmer-Atlas listing. The measure is still the pass: whether the regional dish reaches the table with warmth, proportion, and a clean sense of place.

Wood paneling, firelight, forest

The room does part of the work before the first plate arrives. Wood paneling, a crackling fireplace, and views toward the Black Forest give Kamin- und Bauernstube its name and its pace. This is a stube in the old sense, a room built for staying, but the service is polished enough to keep the rusticity from becoming costume. Conversation can hold its own. Firelight moves across glassware and timber; the forest sits beyond the windows as more than scenery, because the menu keeps returning to the Renchtal and to Baden. In that setting, restraint has somewhere to land. A dish does not need to announce its region when Renchtäler Black Forest trout is already on the plate.