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The light comes in low across the Marktplatz at six, catching the timber frame of the Design Boutique Hotel & SPA Goldene Rose and the gilt of the church beyond it, and for a moment Dinkelsbühl looks exactly like the postcard it has every right to be. Twelve thousand people. A church, a bakery, a near-perfect medieval street plan kept that way by six centuries of luck and one of careful restoration. What the postcard does not show, because it sits behind the 560-year-old facade and above the rooftops, is a five-star spa hotel with an infinity pool that looks the spire of St George's dead in the eye, interiors by NOA, the Bolzano practice that has made hospitality its specialism, and a kitchen the regional guides describe as operating at toque level.
The Design Boutique Hotel & SPA Goldene Rose is an inn that spent the better part of six centuries lodging queens and crown princes, Queen Victoria among them, and, since 2022, reinventing itself as something Bavaria did not previously own: a proper old-town spa hotel. Its restaurant is the Kantine Rosine; its bar, the Queen Vicky, keeps the royal guest's name in lights. Its kitchen is run by Chef Alexander Hundt.
Hundt is from the Pfalz. He took his professional qualification at the Hotelfachschule Heidelberg, Germany's oldest hotel school, trained at the Savoy, and went on, with his colleagues, to cook at a two-Michelin-star level. He has worked in a good many kitchens, and he talks about the trade as a chef does when he means it: cooking, he has said, rewards the person willing to look past the edge of their own plate. He runs the Kantine Rosine as a team rather than a one-man show, which is the first thing worth knowing about how he cooks.
The second is what arrives on the plate. The kitchen's six-course standing tasting menu changes with the season and, on the evidence of a recent edition, is both precise and unafraid. It opened with monkfish cheeks set in a herb jelly against marinated asparagus, moved through a quail roulade lifted by a port wine foam, and continued to veal fillet stuffed and wrapped in leek with baked potato dumplings. A course of Brillat-Savarin and truffle on pumpernickel followed, an unexpected pairing that worked. Dessert is the house signature, the "Golden Rose": butter biscuit, rhubarb, raspberry. There’s also a four-course vegan menu option, and it can be taken with or without a wine pairing, though the pairing is the better way to go.
The wines are chosen by Marcel Scherb, the Kantine Rosine's new sommelier, and the range is deliberately wide. One menu moves from a Scheurebe grown on Rheinhessen limestone to a Pecorino from the Abruzzo coast, an Australian Cabernet from the Murray Darling, a Zweigelt from Burgenland, and a Cap Classique from a boutique estate at the Cape run, as it happens, by a South Tyrolean couple. The list is not assembled to showcase a single region. It is assembled to match the food, and Scherb's brief is to keep extending it.
There is humour in the kitchen too, and it is worth knowing before you sit down. The à la carte menu lists its seasonal asparagus as "Asparagus Tarzan," sold by the glass and the bottle as though it were wine. A scoop of sorbet appears under a heading that thanks a higher power. Hundt cooks seriously without taking himself seriously, a balance not every kitchen at this level manages.
The fullest expression of Hundt's cooking is the Chef's Table, and it is a different proposition from the standing menu in one important respect. The seasonal tasting menu is fixed: the kitchen decides the courses, and the guest orders from a card. The Chef's Table inverts that. The guest chooses the evening, brings their preferences and the ingredients they most want to eat, and Hundt builds a six-course menu around them, prepared fresh that night, with a wine pairing matched to it by Scherb.
What makes the format worth booking is not only the bespoke menu. It is the access. The Chef's Table seats guests close to the kitchen, with Hundt himself moving between the pass and the table, explaining a technique, the source of an ingredient, the thinking behind a particular course. It is, in plain terms, an evening spent in the company of the chef who cooked it, with the food as the reason for the conversation rather than a substitute for it. Few restaurants offer that, and fewer still in a town this size.
The case for Dinkelsbühl is straightforward. A chef with a two-star background and a clear preference for the team over the spotlight, a kitchen already recognised for the precision of its tasting menu, and, in the Chef's Table, the chance to have that kitchen cook to your own brief for an evening. The standing menu is reason enough to come. The Chef's Table is reason to plan the trip around it.
The Kantine Rosine at the Hotel Goldene Rose, Marktplatz 4, Dinkelsbühl, serves a seasonal tasting menu with an optional wine pairing. The Chef's Table is bookable on request for the evening of the guest's choosing: six courses, composed around the guest's preferences and prepared fresh, with an optional wine pairing curated by sommelier Marcel Scherb.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.