Foodie Discovery: Rote Wand Chef’s Table

The tiny hamlet of Zug, which consists of a small church and maybe twenty houses, is not where you would expect to find one of the finest dining experiences in Austria, possibly in all of Europe. But this little town may be the biggest foodie secret of 2024.

I grew up going to Zug, which is a few miles from the stylish ski towns of Lech and Zurs. Every year during our family ski holiday, we would take a horse-drawn sleigh to Stuben, a cozy wood-paneled dining room for fondue. It turns out that the son of the owners of the guesthouse containing Stuben, Josef Walch, took over the business 36 years years ago and has slowly expanded it into a truly innovative ode to gastronomy.

The thriving centerpiece of his obsession is the Rote Wand gourmet/design hotel that Joschi, as everyone calls him, and his wife Natasha created by combining his family’s original guesthouse with other buildings, new and old. The check-in desk is open to the contemporary style Rote Wand restaurant where Alpine specialties like venison ragout and a “souffléd Wienerschnitzel” are served. To the left, in the middle of the gift shop is a glass-domed cheese case featuring a hearty array of aged local cheeses. Guests are welcome to help themselves. A network of underground tunnels connects the main building to the spa, the original Stuben restaurant (which looked remarkably unchanged in three decades) and the underground charcuterie, cookery school and Friends and Fool Culinary Lab and lounge.

As Joshi admits, “We are crazy about everything that has to do with food, drink and high-class hospitality.” Because he loves learning from others, he built a culinary lab with a head chef to experiment with techniques from fermentation and charcuterie to zero-waste. Coffee grounds become kombucha or coffee vinegar, and leftover bread is transformed into miso paste. Chefs from all over Europe are invited for events and masterclasses in the underground space, which feels like a cross between a sleek Nordic library and a stylish Danish dining room. One wall of the kitchen features the handprints of all the chefs who have left their mark, literally and figuratively, on Zug.

But the zenith of Joschi’s gourmet dreams to date is Rote Wand Chef’s Table. Also reached by underground tunnel, it is housed in a former 18th-century schoolhouse, where Joschi himself took classes as a boy. The rustic wood-paneled rooms have been transformed with a state-of-the-art kitchen, encircled by a U-shaped counter for 14 diners. Another Zug native, chef Max Natmessnig—who was making a name for himself at Brooklyn Fare’s Chef’s Table—was lured back home by Joschi in 2017. (I can only imagine the mad and memorable meals-cum-brainstorms that the two would have had hatching the concept.) In 2022 Max was named Chef of the Year by the prestigious gourmet bible Gault Millau. The restaurant was awarded four toques, the equivalent of three Michelin stars. Max was also named best chef in Austria, before he decided to return to Brooklyn Fare and anointed 29-year-old chef Julian Stieger to take over.

So it was baby-faced Chef Julian, who worked at Copenhagen’s Geranium, New York’s Eleven Madison Park and Vienna’s Steirereck before coming to Zug to work with Max, who hosted my evening at Chef’s Table. And host is the correct word because part of the magic here is the intimacy of the experience. Once you ascend a staircase from one of the underground tunnels, you are ushered into a tiny former classroom, still paneled in pale pine. Fellow diners sit on small wooden chairs or on the cushioned benches that ring the room. The Chef and his friendly team of sommeliers and sous chefs greet the group and get the camaraderie flowing as they deliver wine or cider and small plates with the first six of the evening’s nineteen courses. One resembles a tiny donut. “Make sure you place the side with the hole in your mouth before you take a bite,” Julian recommends, and as its filling seeps out of the fresh dough in a surprising savory burst of flavor, the group grins in unison. When an egg cup with a cap topped with caviar and herbs arrives, Julian suggests slipping the caviar inside the cup and stirring it with the egg and other ingredients to whip up a kind of melted caviar soufflé. These series of true amuses bouches (mouth amusements) serve as ice breakers and bond builders as a web of connections between the chef, his team and guests is woven. Before going upstairs to the main dining room built around the kitchen, Chef wheels out a table piled with ingredients. Amongst the robust mushrooms and vibrant vegetables is a plump duck that he explains lived a long and indulgent duck life before its slaughter.

Knowing where every ingredient comes from has become a culinary first-principle, but when I first saw the duck, I wondered if this was culinary zeal that may have been best left in the kitchen. Upstairs, though, as we gathered at the U-shaped counter and we watched the chefs practicing a kind of reverent choreography, building intricate mosaics of sliced vegetables, I realized that this was part of the inclusion that Chef Julian was building. He worked his way around our seats, personally shaving the late-season truffles that had been driven up from Italy the day before. And when the Peking Duck came out, it was he who drizzled the sauce over the slices on our plates. At my first taste, the hallelujah choir of my taste buds erupted. This was the best duck of my life—like tasting Massimo Bottura’s crispy lasagna or Alain Ducasse’s Provencal chicken with artichokes at Louis XIV in Monaco twenty some years ago. I knew that this was a sensory epiphany I would never forget and one that existed because of Julian’s love, not just of process, but of origin.

And for the first time in two hours, silence descended in the former schoolroom. There was not a sound, not the clink of a fork nor the rustle of a napkin. We were all reveling in the extraordinary gift offered by the well-lived duck, Chef Julian and his team.