Wolfgang Hingerl heads up four restaurants in Munich, with different types of cuisine but one thing in common: the products are almost exclusively sourced regionally. A working day in the life of an allrounder.
You could prepare kimchi with it. But of course also traditional sauerkraut, quite an excellent one even. Or roulades! On a field near Ismaning, giant heads of cabbage are loaded onto a trailer, already stacked metres high. They are absurd plants, larger than medicine balls.
We go by car with Wolfgang Hingerl towards the northeast of Munich and spend a working day in the life of a restaurateur to whom it is very important to know where his products come from. The morning sun makes the country road in northeastern Munich shimmer, where the land becomes flatter and no longer resembles the postcards with hilly and terraced Alpine foothills.
Hingerl has already been raving profusely about the upper Bavarian hazelnut, what exquisite spreads can be made out of it. And now these heads of cabbage, right in front of our windscreen. Ismaning cabbage! It only grows here. “It actually ought to be declared a world heritage,” he eulogises.
Hingerl runs four restaurants in Munich, where every day storerooms have to be checked, goods have to be distributed, everything must be monitored. The restaurateur regularly steps in the kitchen if someone is absent or all hell is let loose somewhere.
Today a visit to the Mural Farmhouse is also on the agenda, the newest of his establishments, where very product-focussed, regional high cuisine is offered. This is particularly dependent on excellent basic products. That alone is a good enough reason to make use of a local supplier network.
The Ismaning cabbage! “It actually ought to be declared a world heritage,” Hingerl eulogises.
Because quite apart from the fact that he is thereby supporting the regional economic cycles and that it enables personal contact, he has the opportunity to put fresh food from the field onto plates and to be inspired time and time again by the wealth of products that the particularly dedicated farmers, gardeners, cultivators and processors all around Munich produce. We would like to get to know one of these exceptional suppliers – which is why we are on our way to Forstinning together with Hingerl, to the organic farm run by Amadé Billesberger.
The driveway into the historical four-sided courtyard has enough space for a coach-and-four. In past times, one of these collected the milled flour. Today the mill is no longer in use, instead more than a hundred types of vegetable grow alongside crops on the fields and in the gardens all around the farm. Apart from that, 800 hens live here, as well as a herd of sheep.
Billesberger, who everybody only calls “Mogli”, steps into the kitchen, still with specks of the fertile earth on his hands, “round grain”, as he is about to explain, which covers the tuff ground and limestone rock here.
Before we make our way across the farm, Hingerl and Billesberger talk shop over a cappuccino about the challenges of finding personnel, working hours in gastronomy and on a farm. The conversation also turns briefly towards the best type of potato for a potato salad. Spoiler: it's the Simonetta. At least, if you believe a man whose farm shop alone sells seven sorts from the latest harvest.
The Billesberger farm evokes a search-and-find picture from a richly illustrated children's book. To one side, sheep are just being herded onto the pasture, a bucolic meadow landscape with a sparse mixed woodland. An apprentice bursts onto the scene, reporting that one of the hens – all dual-purpose hens who peck wild herbs by day in front of their mobile coops or wallow in the sand on the shores – appears to him today to be unusually thin. Billesberger has it taken to the nursing coop.
The best type of potato for a potato salad? It's the Simonetta.
In front of the house stand sage bushes, as well as stacks of colourful pumpkins in wooden crates, while the trees in the garden bear heavy quinces. We march out onto the field, where Billesberger wants to show us special field fruits.
What made him think of converting everything to organic when he took over the farm from his father in 2007? “I have simply never been able to imagine all that with toxins and pesticides,” he says. “For a long time, my diet has consisted largely of vegetables. I didn’t feel like buying the shrink-wrapped organic stuff from Spain anymore at the supermarket.”
Billesberger therefore learnt five-fold crop rotation, organised seeds and saplings of old types, and did more and more over time. “For us it is of course also of interest because of the taste,” Hingerl adds. While present-day conventional farming primarily cultivates hybrids, with a focus on appearance and shelf life, the old types feature a completely different aroma.
We are not getting very far. Every couple of metres, Billesberger picks a leaf or a stalk by the path and asks us to bite into it. The first tastes of mustard. It is, in fact. There is also oil radish blossom and Japanese cress. He finally comes to a standstill at a spot where unremarkable stalks stick out of the field. Before he does any picking, he briefly illuminates the differences between the various types of Japanese sweet potato, their aroma and consistency.
Then he picks a narrow purple root out of the ground, shakes it off and presses it into our hands. It is a murasaki, a purple gromwell, rich in antioxidants, with hints of chestnut in its taste. He gives Hingerl two armfuls of it. In the forthcoming days, it will delight guests at one of his restaurants.
“In gastronomy, sometimes there is too much enthusiasm,” Hingerl says.
Billesberger's mother invites us to lunch, vegetables cooked in the oven. Very simple, so that one can taste all the ingredients from the meadows and fields all around the Billesberger farm. But then we really do have to get going.
The next stop on the way to the Farmhouse is Berg am Laim. “Winefurore” is written on a warehouse that looks unremarkable from the outside. Inside, however, it conceals a refined selection of wines. France, Germany, Austria, classical and “low intervention”, as Hingerl likes to call the natural wines currently very much in fashion. “We also have a bit of South Tyrol,” Gerhard Biber explains, the senior boss. “And in eastern Europe, we are all ears.”
Hingerl fosters friendly relations with his most important wine supplier, where he regularly seeks inspiration if he hasn’t got time for a wine journey. And this attitude simply works. “Fewer interventions, a lot more work in the vineyard, for low intervention wines it is a bit like with the organic farmers,” Hingerl explains. “And with the Bibers, and it simply all comes together: time, leisure and dedication when it comes to taking this path together.”
Specialist knowledge also comes into it. “In gastronomy, sometimes there is too much enthusiasm,” Hingerl says. Occasionally wines can be selected rather too hurriedly. “At the Bibers', they are sampled with care and forethought. They are incredibly precise here.” Hingerl for his part, Biber adds, is an absolute pioneer when it comes to new wine styles, it would not be possible to develop a suitable product range at all without such restaurateurs... then he stops, looking bewildered, and looks around as if he had suddenly noticed that none of us were wearing any trousers. “Would you like to try something?
The afternoon takes its course with a glass of Riesling from Germany. “Nierstein, Roter Hang. One of the best sites there,” Biber explains. “Pettenthal, the major cultivation by Kühling-Gillot.” This wine also meets strict organic criteria, but it is by no means a natural wine, dull and with hints of cider. It is very clear in the glass, the triad of nose, palate and finish is closely meshed, spectacular. “It is quite mature, three years, which is advantageous,” Biber says. “2020 was quite a rich harvest ...” Hingerl adds.
Of course, we could have kept going like this for a long time. But Hingerl still wanted to call in at the Farmhouse. So off we headed through town, to Obersendling. He gives everyone in the restaurant a friendly greeting. We follow him into the kitchen, where char is being filleted and spring onions chopped, dough pressed by hand through a pasta machine. We watch the cooking professionals in fascination, how they turn everything that Hingerl procures into little works of art. Readymade tortellini are already gathering on a floured baking tray.
We let Hingerl get on with his work, in any case he has almost already forgotten his companions, standing there among his team, happy and proud, like a young circus director who still cannot really believe that this major show is pulled off successfully every evening over and over again.
