Spielweg

Game at the family stove

Wild game gives Viktoria Fuchs, chef at Spielweg in Münstertal, her first decision at the pass: how much of the South Black Forest to leave intact, and where to fold in another register. She is head chef and co-leader of the family hotel-restaurant, working inside a house first recorded in 1705 and carried by the Fuchs family for six generations. The lineage here is not an ornament on the wall. It sits in the dairy, the inn rooms, the seasonal herbs and edible flowers, the service rhythm, and the expectation that the kitchen remains answerable to the valley around it.

Fuchs came through formal kitchen roles before returning to Spielweg: Ausbildung and Chef Gardemanger at Restaurant Hirschen, Chef Entremetier and Commis saucer at Landhaus St. Urban, then Demi Chef and Chef Gardemanger at Restaurant Luce d'oro. Those stations show in the composure of the cooking. Her own language stays closer to home than to career architecture: “My recipes are embedded in the stories surrounding our family business and our home, the South Black Forest. Both have shaped me and both have a major influence on my own way of cooking.” At Spielweg, that sentence is not a preface. It is the method.

Wild boar folded into dim sum

The kitchen’s most telling gesture is not a split between tradition and influence, but the way Fuchs lets them share a plate. Wild boar dim sum arrives from a Black Forest game tradition, then moves through an Asian form with soy beside it. Smoked char from the Wutach sits in cold potato and leek broth, a dish built from freshwater fish, smoke, starch, and temperature rather than display. The house works seasonally and sources locally, with produce from the surrounding Nature Park frame, its own herbs, edible flowers, vegetables, fruit trees, Hinterwald beef, and a cheese dairy established in 1995.

The dairy matters because it keeps part of the kitchen’s authority bench-side. Spielweger Bergkäse and Obermünstertäler Weichkäse come from the house’s own dairy and natural ripening cellar, giving the menu a material base that is made in the same family system that serves it. The restaurant holds a Michelin Green Star, first awarded in 2021, and three awards in total. Fuchs has also been part of Jeunes Restaurateurs since 2018, a useful context for the international fluency in her cooking, but the plates stay anchored by game, river fish, dairy, and the valley’s growing season.

Wood paneling, stoves, and a quiet room

The room keeps the old inn close. Wood paneling, tiled stoves, and Black Forest proportions soften the discipline of the pass, so the cooking does not land in a white-walled vacuum. Spielweg still reads as a family house before it reads as a destination restaurant: intimate, rustic, and quiet, with service that moves carefully around tables rather than turning the dining room into theater. The effect suits Fuchs’s food. A steamed wild boar parcel can carry soy without needing to announce a concept; a smoked char can hold the Wutach in its name and still feel like dinner.

The beverage program follows that scale. Sommelier-led wine work, including Baden-focused evenings and local Spätburgunder alongside wider selections, gives the game and fish a cellar conversation rather than a decorative pairing. Nothing here asks to be separated from the house. The next plate to understand is still the one closest to Fuchs’s own sentence about home: wild boar dim sum at Spielweg.