The Crème Brûlée is a Trout - or is it?

Eines für ALLE, ALLE für Eines. ‘One for all, all for one’, in German: Dumas's Three Musketeers put through the Tyrolean wringer, chalked onto a slate in a stone-framed window beneath the upstairs shutters, and, as a credo for the restaurant behind it, totally accurate.

This is Restaurant Blauen Traube, on the Alte Landstraße in Algund (Lagundo, on the Italian side of the timetable), just outside Merano, where Chef Christoph Huber has spent six years making a quiet, mischievous case for South Tyrolean cuisine. The facade is ochre stucco and rust-red shutters, with WIRTSHAUS and TRAUBE hand-painted in faded Roman capitals and Zur blauen tucked in blackletter blue between them. Out the back, an ancient vine pergola does most of the architectural work, candlelit tables beneath it, wild grasses pressing in at the edges.

Huber arrived in March 2019, a sous chef in the way James Bond used to be a commander: technically true, somewhat understating the case. He had cooked under Chef Christian Jürgens at Überfahrt Tegernsee (then three Michelin stars) and spent his most formative seasons as Chef Gerhard Wieser's right hand at the Trenkerstube, with the long shadow of Norbert Niederkofler's Cook the Mountain over the valley. To inherit a country pub with that curriculum vitae is, you imagine, both the gift and the gauntlet.

He calls his kitchen radikal lokal, which translates rather better as "brutally regional" and rather less well as anything else. By day the dining room behaves itself: the lunch menu is à la carte, dine-in only, and gloriously unbothered - spinach spätzle, crisp meat fritters, and a vitello tonnato. By night, the menu narrows to a single point. There is one evening tasting menu, ninety-nine euros, the same for every table: a lovingly imposed tyranny in which the only real decision left to you is whether to add the optional Tyrolean ossobuco (Reader, you add it).

It opens, properly speaking, with the bread. A dark, charred sourdough is brought down the room on a stump of birch and quartered with an old carpenter's bow saw, the kind a grandfather might have hung above his workbench. It is theatre, of course, and like all the best theatre, it has the decency to be useful as well: the crust resists, the saw earns its keep, and the room lets out the sort of conspiratorial laugh good rooms reserve for the chef who has chosen to wink.

What follows is a procession of polite ambushes. A trout crème brûlée arrives where a sweet one ought to be, its caramelised crust replaced, with a perfectly straight face, by burnt chicken skin. A chestnut miso behaves as if it has always been miso. The risotto carbonara, his most ardently loved dish, performs the trick of being both at once and entirely itself. There is salt-in-bocca, the saltimbocca's slyer cousin; arctic char in olive oil; venison from the woods above; and, at the close, a tarte Tatin so faithful to its forebears it ought to come with footnotes (It doesn't. It comes with vanilla ice cream, the only correct answer). The cheesecake before it is set tableside in fresh sheep's milk that arrived that morning unpasteurised, the rennet stirred at the table, the buckwheat ice cream lifted from his grandmother.

The plates come from a regional ceramicist who, like the best of them, has no shop. The wine list leans into small Alto Adige and northern-Italian growers. The team are young, mostly local, conducting themselves with that South Tyrolean blend of seriousness and unforced charm: Stefan Vorhauser at Huber's elbow, Michael Schwienbacher steering the room.

The accolades. Falstaff's Best Young Chef in 2020, four toques and 17.5 points at Gault&Millau by 2024, a listing in Identità Golose, a leap from 79th to 11th in the South Tyrolean Restaurant Ranking in a single year. None of which, mercifully, has gone to the room's head, though the foodie press has rather noticed.

Sundays and Mondays the lights are off, the saw goes back on its peg, and Huber and his team disappear into the larders and wine cabinets of their colleagues, which is the most Wirtshaus thing imaginable. When the weather is kind, he is also to be found at altitude: Christoph is chef-patron of ROTWAND by Boutique Hotel Miramonti, the mountain restaurant at 1,818 metres in the Meran(o) 2000 ski-and-hiking area, where lunch is on a south-facing terrace beside what they call the highest coffee roastery in the Alps.

Christoph Huber, a 17th-century inn outside Merano, a chalkboard borrowed from French novelist Dumas, and one menu for everyone.

Painted ochre facade of Wirtshaus zur Blauen Traube in Algund, South Tyrol, with rust-red shutters, climbing ivy and the chalkboard credo Eines für ALLE, ALLE für Eines | TheAficionados.com

Diners gathered beneath the ancient vine pergola in the back garden at Blaue Traube, Algund, lit by warm string lights at the close of a summer evening | TheAficionados.com

An opening course arriving in a hand-thrown stoneware bowl on cream linen at Christoph Huber's Blaue Traube, Lagundo | TheAficionados.com

Small-grower South Tyrolean and Alto Adige wines lined up on the stone window ledge at Blaue Traube, Algund | TheAficionados.com

Dark sourdough sliced on a birch stump with the old carpenter's bow saw, the signature opening to dinner at Christoph Huber's Blaue Traube | TheAficionados.com

Fresh sheep's milk cheesecake set tableside in front of the guest at Blaue Traube, Algund | TheAficionados.com

Chef-patron Christoph Huber, centre, with sous chef Stefan Vorhauser and a member of the brigade outside the back door of Wirtshaus zur Blauen Traube, Algund | TheAficionados.com

Wirtshaus zur Blauen Traube
Alte Landstraße / Strada Vecchia 44
39022 Algund / Lagundo
South Tyrol

Dinner Tuesday to Saturday, Sundays and Mondays dark. Reservations essential via blauetraube.it.

ROTWAND at Meran(o) 2000 bookings via hotel-miramonti.com.