(Gastronomy) A striking discrepancy. The density of excellent restaurants in Austria, even outside the cities, is remarkable. And yet, the country has only appeared with a handful of names on the international map of gourmet addresses. After several years of awarding stars, the “Michelin Guide” withdrew from Austria in 2009 and only rated the cities of Vienna and Salzburg in the “Main Cities of Europe” edition (which has in the meantime been discontinued). Since then, numerous star-worthy restaurants have been off international guests’ radar, from Burgenland in the Pannonian-influenced east to Vorarlberg in the Alpine west. This is about to change in 2025. The “Michelin Guide” is returning, largely financed by public funds, enraging entrepreneurs behind other restaurant guides.

Although there are currently numerous cross-continental best-of lists that point the way to recommended restaurants, many gourmets base their travels on the Michelin Guide with its well-known stars, the green stars (for sustainability, a controversial award in the industry due to the unclear criteria) established in 2020, and the “Bibs”, which indicate a particularly attractive price-performance ratio for high-quality cuisine.

To mark its comeback in Austria, Maison Ë presents four restaurants that deserve international recognition. JOLA in Vienna’s city center is one of the world’s rare addresses for vegan fine dining at the highest level. Doubek, also located in Vienna, offers multi-course menus focusing on fish and seafood from an elaborately installed fire kitchen. For many years, Forelle on the high-altitude Weissensee lake in Carinthia has put the lake and the surrounding landscape center stage, while the Rote Wand Chef’s Table on Arlberg offers cosmopolitan cuisine with Alpine ingredients in the ambience of a centuries-old village school.

Jonathan Wittenbrink and Larissa Andres don’t reveal it on their website: At Jola, which they opened in 2022, they don’t only exclude fish and meat, but all animal products in general. For the young couple – he in the kitchen, she responsible for service and wine – it’s perfectly normal for a fine-dining surprise menu of around fifteen courses to be entirely vegan. Born in 1991 and 1998 respectively, the two met and fell in love at the vegetarian Michelin-starred restaurant Tian and will soon be opening another vegan restaurant in Vienna’s city center with the support of an investor.

The first mini-courses that Wittenbrink sends out of Jola’s narrow open-plan kitchen, are already quite spectacular: a small cup of bisque, for example, which you would blindly recognize as crustacean. How is that possible? Wittenbrink prepares it in exactly the same way as the lobster bisque during his apprenticeship: with saffron, cognac, fennel and so on, except he replaces the lobster with pumpkin and sweetcorn, creating a sophisticated deception for the palate. No less masterful are bites such as a Jerusalem artichoke croquette, a pumpkin tartlet with mature soy sauce or a tiny tostada with flower sprouts and black garlic. A dish called Tafelspitz doesn’t actually feature the famous boiled beef of Viennese cuisine; instead, it turns out to be sensitively arranged root vegetables with a bread sauce with horseradish, and a steamed horseradish bun. With agnolotti al dente with winter leaf vegetables and, as a main course, a miraculously braised tranche of a mushroom called lion’s mane, it’s no wonder the vegan JOLA is so well booked.

Restaurant Doubek, which opened in autumn 2023 in the tranquil Viennese district of Josefstadt, is run by a young entrepreneurial couple as well: chef Stefan Doubek and Nora Pein, both experienced in Michelin-starred gastronomy and with a sense of hierarchy. Nora Pein is responsible for the wine, and the wine cellar is indeed quite impressive.

The desire to install a fire kitchen in an old inner-city tenement building was not only a considerable challenge for the Viennese authorities; the conversion work, in which the stove-maker also played a central role, was lengthy and nerve-wracking.

Stefan Doubek has a longstanding fondness for fire; and for the best seafood, which he uses both hyper-fresh and dry-aged. He treats the raw tails of magnificent carabineros, red prawns, delicately with glowing charcoal, and feeds the roasted heads through a duck press to turn them into a Titian red elixir. King crab shoulder meat makes an appearance in the almost twenty-course menu at Doubek, as does the inter-fin meat of a mature turbot. Accompanying elements and flavors are often Asian-influenced, whether it’s the XO sauce with roasted onions served with scallops, the Szechuan pepper with duck or the Japanese grater and tiny bamboo whisk used to sprinkle kaffir lime dust on a citrus granité. Speaking of which: some of the dozens of different citrus fruits used at Doubek come from the restaurateur couple’s private terrace.

Josef “Joschi” Walch has never concealed the fact that his Chef’s Table is inspired by leading international establishments: both The Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare in New York and Frantzén in Stockholm, which has influenced numerous restaurants in general, have left their conceptual mark on the village of Zug near Lech am Arlberg.

Walch has created an open kitchen with a few seats arranged in an L in the tiny schoolhouse dating from 1780, right next to a small church and his family-run Hotel Rote Wand. As with concert tickets, payment is made in advance, something else he has brought to Austria from abroad. The chef of the Rote Wand Chef’s Table is Julian Stieger, who was lured to the high mountains from the three-star restaurant Geranium in Copenhagen. After the aperitif with the first bites such as a choux pastry with eel, duck liver and blueberries, Stieger presents the menu in the form of the unprocessed main ingredients. Then it’s time to head upstairs, where guests can watch the kitchen team putting the finishing touches to the dishes. Many elements are elegantly rustic, such as a “black pudding bread” or a pre-dessert with beeswax, salty milk foam, white beetroot and flower pollen – worldly sophistication with a down-to-earth Alpine touch.

A mountain lake at an altitude of around a thousand meters above sea level with Caribbean turquoise water, that’s Lake Weissensee in western Carinthia. The Müller family’s hotel Die Forelle is located directly on this lake. It is a place that exemplifies sustainability and appreciation, from energy production to the use of goods; in short, zero waste.

Hannes Müller runs the hotel together with his wife Monika. As head chef, he is responsible for the “Berg.See.Küche” and was named “Chef of the Year” by the Austrian “Gault Millau” in 2024. Wild catches from the lake, such as lake trout or sashimi-grade carp, are just as much a focal point as old local grain varieties and wild plants such as goutweed and hop asparagus; Müller has been exploring these unusual seasoning flavors for years. The ingredients are sourced as exclusively as possible directly from producers around Lake Weissensee, deliberately bypassing any middlemen. The products are processed in their entirety and preserved using traditional methods. “Our harvest season is also in winter,” is the motto here, when the abundant jars of preserves are opened.