The First

Monthly changes at the pass

A five-course menu changes monthly under Chef Marcello Fabbri at The First in Weimarer Land, Blankenhain. The work sits inside Restaurant The First at Spa & GolfResort Weimarer Land, where Italian cooking is held in a modern fine-dining frame and the kitchen leans on excellent produce from Italy, pasta, and seasonal material from the resort’s vegetable garden. Fabbri took the kitchen in 2023, and his record before that is specific to this region: in 2003, at Restaurant Anna Amalia in Weimar’s Hotel Elephant, he became the first chef to win a Michelin star for Thuringia, and he led that kitchen for many years. At The First, that background reads best in the demand for steadiness. A tasting menu has little room for drift. Each course has to arrive with its heat, seasoning, garnish, sauce and pace intact, and the standard must renew itself when the compositions change again.

The restaurant’s Italian line is not a rustic quotation. It is a disciplined program of classical roots, Mediterranean memory, and Thuringian seasonality. The First holds 1 Michelin Star in the 2025 Guide, and that distinction belongs to this house in Blankenhain. The useful fact is the shape of the work: a compact sequence, changed by the month, built for a room where the kitchen is partially open and the pass remains part of the evening rather than hidden behind it.

Pasta, stock and the five-course frame

The menu architecture is fixed enough to give the kitchen a clear rhythm and flexible enough to keep the bench alert. Five courses allow the Italian materials to carry more than one register: pasta as a central pleasure, seafood sharpened by stock and acid, game or veal given weight through truffle or liver, and a sweet finish that guests have singled out for the patisserie’s hand. One reported dish, Norway lobster baked in katayfi threads, depends on contrast: crisp outside, juicy inside, then an intense stock and lemony olive sorbet to cut through the richness. Another, venison veal with truffles and duck liver, moves in the opposite direction, gathering density rather than release.

The produce matters because the method asks it to. Italian ingredients give the restaurant its spine, while the resort’s vegetable garden brings a local counterpoint into the menu without forcing the cooking into a regional costume. Monthly change is a technical pressure. It asks the station to repeat standards while changing forms, to keep the pasta supple, the stocks clean, the sorbet cold enough to refresh rather than numb, and the plates coherent through the whole sequence.

Light from the conservatory

The room is modern and quiet, with a light-flooded conservatory, a partially open kitchen, and a summer terrace that changes the air around the meal when the season allows. The counterpoint between resort calm and kitchen concentration gives The First its particular charge. Guests see enough of the pass to understand that the tasting menu is being assembled in real time, but the room does not turn the labor into theatre. It keeps the work close and the service formal.

That restraint suits the cooking. Italian fine dining can become decorative when the room asks for display; here, the better measure is control. Pasta arrives as the house’s declared strength, the vegetable garden gives the plate a local edge, and the conservatory keeps the craft in view without crowding it. If there is a place to end, it is at the pass, where the monthly menu turns again around pasta, stock, sorbet, and the light of The First’s conservatory.