Magdalena - Switzerland

Vegetables held to a pastry standard

The first decision is restraint: Dominik Hartmann, chef and co-owner at Restaurant Magdalena in Lucerne, works from Rickenbach with vegetables at the center of the pass, not as garnish. His first training was in pastry and confectionery, a discipline that shows in the way the kitchen treats texture, acidity, temperature and sequence. Hartmann trained under Andreas Caminada and Fabian Fuchs before opening Magdalena in 2020 with his wife Adriana Hartmann and Marco Appert in a renovated historic building in Rickenbach, Schwyz. The address sits outside the city proper, at Rickenbachstrasse 127, with Lake Lucerne and the Alps in the wider field of view, but the work is not scenic cooking. It is a vegetable kitchen built on regional produce, ferments, stocks, sauces and the refusal of industrially processed shortcuts. Magdalena earned 15 GaultMillau points and Discovery of the Year in 2021; in 2022 it became the first two-star restaurant in Europe to serve exclusively vegetarian cuisine. The award matters because it names the level of execution. The station matters more.

Raw, rugged, regional on the pass

Hartmann describes the cooking in a tight phrase: raw, rugged, regional. In practice, that means the kitchen gives vegetables the structure usually assigned to meat or fish, then lets their edges remain visible. Beetroot can arrive as a steak. Kohlrabi can be rolled with almonds and nut butter. Radish can move through the meal as a fermented snack, a stone with basil and ricotta, or a sharper note in the opening sequence. The menu changes with the season, but the method stays legible: vegetable essences, house-made bread and butter, tartlets with celery and pear, mushroom and fig crustades, Jerusalem artichoke flan, peas with mint and pistachio, tomato with raspberry and pine nuts, fennel with saffron and ginger, agnolotti with dark truffle espuma. The kitchen grows some ingredients itself and works closely with local, often organic, farmers. It also carries the less visible labor of a vegetable program, turning trim and surplus into stocks, sauces and ferments rather than treating them as loss.

A wooden house with a wide field of view

The room sits inside a restored wooden building dating to 1326, old timber brought into conversation with a bright, open interior. Floor-to-ceiling windows pull the valley, Lake Lauerz and the surrounding mountains close to the tables; the pass answers with plates that keep the same alpine register without becoming rustic theater. There is a second, smaller room, the Martha Stübli, where the scale tightens and the house feels more private. The service has the pace of a young room that knows its sequence: wine, juice and non-alcoholic pairings move alongside the menu without turning the meal into a lecture. Magdalena also has its own bakery with a terrace, which gives the bread program a visible place in the house rather than leaving it as a quiet arrival in a basket.

The discipline after the firsts

Firsts can flatten a restaurant if the kitchen begins serving the fact instead of the food. Hartmann’s better answer is to keep pushing the vegetable work into recognizable craft: acidity, fermentation, pastry precision, regional produce and the long use of each ingredient. The next measure here is not a claim about what may come, but the continued pressure on the pass to make a meat-free menu carry its own weight. At Magdalena, that pressure has a name in the room: beetroot steak.