La Lumosa - The Stube of Good Taste

At Ansitz Steinbock, a 15th-century South Tyrolean castle above the vines of Villandro, a gifted young chef and a 6-metre-deep wine cellar are rewriting what Alpine dining can be at restaurant La Lumosa.

There is a moment, arriving at Ansitz Steinbock on the sunlit plateau above the artists' town of Klausen, when you wonder whether you have taken a wrong turning somewhere between the present and the past. The castle rises from the slope with the particular authority of a building that has never once doubted its place in the world: glacial grey, Gothic in bearing, frescoed coat of arms above the entrance, cobbled inner courtyard utterly unchanged since the 15th century. And then you step inside, and the geometry of expectation shifts entirely.

Within the old stone walls, Ansitz Steinbock is something else altogether: warm, considered, almost tenderly assembled. Original spruce floors, loam-plastered walls, smoked oak, cast iron and local pine, set against a palette of charcoal grey and white marl. The twelve suites are named for the legends and local luminaries who once walked these slopes. The saunas are Finnish, the baths are deep and freestanding, and Elisabeth, who took over the Steinbock at the age of twenty and has run it with fierce devotion ever since, greets each arrival with the particular ease of someone utterly at home in their world.

But it is at the table that the Steinbock makes its most emphatic declaration.

The hotel has been feeding guests since 1750, which is either a point of heritage pride or an extraordinary burden depending on which side of the kitchen pass you stand. René Tschager, who has been head chef here since October 2024, appears unbothered by either reading. Still in his mid-twenties, born and raised in nearby Völs, he won against the best apprentices in the country at WorldSkills Italy 2020 in Bolzano before going on to hone a cooking philosophy that is, in his own words, as personal as it is precise. The philosophy runs something like: be better today than yesterday, and better tomorrow than today. His cooking runs something like that too.

La Lumosa, the fine dining room reserved for just four tables and listed in the Michelin Guide, creates a menu in five or seven courses, which is the most precise expression of his thinking. Tschager's compass points north as much as it does south: Nordic in its clarity, South Tyrolean in its soul, and informed throughout by a respect for forgotten ingredients and the kind of traditional preparation methods that produce flavours most kitchens no longer remember how to find. There is nothing theatrical here, no truffle-shaving ceremony, no smoke and mirrors. Just the concentrated pleasure of one extraordinary dish arriving quietly after another, in a room of ancient stone walls that lend the whole experience a weight it frankly does not need.

On the floor, the wine programme is in the hands of Bastian and Sonja, sommeliers whose knowledge of the six-metre-deep Gothic vaulted cellar, and its eight hundred labels, is both encyclopaedic and personal. The cellar runs deep into the rock beneath the castle, stocked with rare South Tyrolean finds alongside bottles from Burgundy, Franciacorta and the Wachau. They are generous with their knowledge, and generous with the glass.

The Steinbock's other dining modes offer their own distinct pleasures. The five-course Alpine dinner served in the Courthouse Stube draws on produce from the family's own farm: seasonal vegetables, garden herbs, tomatoes ripened slowly in the mountain sun. And the Stain, youngest and most convivial of the three concepts, has been keeping the Wirtsstubetradition alive since that original 1750 opening: canederli bread dumplings, handmade pasta, freshwater alpine fish, and Villnösser Brillenschaf, a Slow Food Presidium sheep breed raised on the hotel's own herd, which arrives at the table with the quiet confidence of something genuinely irreplaceable.

In an era when the word "authentic" is deployed so freely it has lost most of its meaning, there is something properly moved about sitting in this candlelit parlour-stube, eight tables, wood-panelled walls, the smell of good wine in the air, and knowing that the kitchen has been lit here, more or less continuously, for two hundred and seventy-five years. René Tschagerdidn't inherit that legacy. He chose to inhabit it, then quietly began to make it his own.

Forgotten ingredients, he's 26, Nordic instincts, six metres of very good wine, René Tschager is cooking things South Tyrol forgot it remembered.

Chef René Tschager, owner Elisabeth Rabensteiner and sommelier Bastian, Ansitz Steinbock, South Tyrol

Wood-panelled dining room table set for fine dining at La Lumosa, Ansitz Steinbock, Villandro

René Tschager pouring sauce tableside at La Lumosa fine dining restaurant, Ansitz Steinbock