Le Pavillon

A kitchen held to the tasting menu

The pass turns on seafood and vegetables. Martin Herrmann, the executive chef at Le Pavillon in Bad Peterstal, works in a kitchen built around a tasting menu and the discipline of French cooking. The restaurant sits within Hotel Dollenberg in Bad Peterstal-Griesbach, where the dining room looks out to the Black Forest and the menu pulls Baden produce toward a more international register. The house carries two Michelin stars, with a modern Baden-French language that allows Mediterranean and Far Eastern accents without letting them take over the plate. Herrmann began at the Dollenberg as an apprentice under Meinrad Schmiederer, the hotel’s patron and former chef and his brother-in-law, and he has stayed at the property since. He took the restaurant’s first Michelin star in 1998 and a second in 2010, and the house has held two for more than twenty-five years. What reads on the plate is a career’s worth of the same habits: sauces kept close, courses paced as a progression, and a preference for local forests, fields, meadows and lakes as the first material of the menu.

Five to eight courses, with sauce as the hinge

The program moves through five to eight courses, with shorter forms available, and the menu changes with market and season. Saddle of venison with celery, porcini mushrooms, cranberries, and semolina dumplings keeps the Baden footing visible; turbot with artichoke and vin jaune sauce brings the French cellar note forward; Carabinero prawns with basil ice cream, fennel, and chorizo let the kitchen step south without losing its frame. The method here is less about spectacle than proportion. A firm piece of fish needs a sauce that carries acidity and length. Venison needs sweetness, earth, and a dumpling with enough weight to answer the cut. Foie gras with apricot, yogurt, and brioche belongs to the same grammar, fat checked by fruit and lactic brightness. The cheese trolley, supplied by Affineur Waltmann, extends the meal before dessert rather than interrupting it. Christophe Meyer’s wine program works from a cellar spanning thirty countries, with a strong German and regional spine, then reaches outward when a course asks for it.

The room, the glass, the Black Forest

The room gives the cooking a formal setting without making the view decorative. Chandeliers, lush fabrics, and floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Black Forest as the meal moves from first bites to the later, quieter courses. Service stays close to the plate and the glass, especially when pairings move between local bottles, French structure, and less expected pours from the cellar. The restaurant is quiet enough for the small gestures to register: a sauce set down at the pass, a trolley eased toward the table, the pause before a wine is named. That stillness matters. It lets the craft arrive course by course, not as theatre but as sequence.

A cellar cut into the hillside

The most specific counterpoint to the kitchen is below ground. Meyer’s cellar is built into the mountainside in four sections, including cool rooms suited to Riesling and a fridge for premium bottles. The list is divided with roughly a third German wines, another third French, and the remaining third international, a structure that mirrors the kitchen’s own Baden-French base and its wider reach. At Le Pavillon, the plate lands on turbot with artichoke and sauce.