Food, and later on wine, has always played an important part in my life
Growing up in a three generation household together with seven other children, the start of each day was marked by all of us coming together at a vast round table. On this table we have been having all three meals a day together and classic table manners have been an important issue, especially for my dear mother.
"It was exciting for me as a child to discover the straggly sweet and salty pickled fish, smoked eels and other weird things in Denmark whilst sailing in the Danish Baltic Sea."
Given the size of our household, restaurant visits were rare and thus marked very special occasions with all of us being at our best behaviour. It was exciting for me as a child to discover the straggly sweet and salty pickled fish, smoked eels and other weird things in Denmark whilst sailing in the Danish Baltic Sea. Later on, the family staple “Chinese” restaurant surprised and delighted us with powerful flavours of fermented items (and surely a lot of glutamate)...
However, one of the most exciting experiences in my childhood was an otherwise catastrophic short holiday in Northern Italy, when we had some incredible fresh porcini for lunch in a small roadside trattorie and a deep and lasting love for authentic Italian cuisine was born.
At the age of fifteen I moved to Scotland and stayed with a family, who became in a way my second parents. Though the Scottish cuisine I got to experience at this time was delicious home cooking, the readily available Indian and Pakistani food was an utterly new and delightful experience for me.
In the subsequent years I got to work a lot in England, where this love was deepend and till this day, the Bombay Brasserie in London is one of my favorite places of all time!
Once back in Germany, my career in the music industry advanced surprisingly fast and once again I remember as a relatively young person being amazed by the intricate food of classic Michelin starred restaurants like Louis C Jacob, Tafelhaus and then soon Taube Tonbach. The cuisine of outstanding chefs like Paul Bocuse, Robouchon, Geert van Hecke, Eckart Witzigmann, Ernst Winckler and many others made life a lot more beautiful.
My job as the manager of our record label and managing celebrity pop stars led me through all of Germany as well as to such far flung places as Hong Kong and Japan. I got to enjoy a very comprehensive variety of cuisines and wines - in 2002 I had the pleasure of dining in over 100 Michelin starred restaurants…
All of this changed dramatically, when I visited the tiny Transylvanian village of Cund in 2003 and decided to spend more time in Transilvania.
"When my then girlfriend Ulrike declared in 2004 during a holiday in Romania, that she “could truly live here” things became clearer and three months later we both moved permanently to Romania!"
This was a turning point in my culinary journey, as until this point in time I never used to cook!
The first three years in Cund we have been mainly living off pasta and some pan fried meat dishes, nothing too elaborate but already quite tasty due to the utterly delicious local produce.
My culinary highlight in Transylvania became the fresh stuff cooked on innards and tenderloin with lots of garlic, red wine and fresh blood when people were slaughtering a pig.
The secret to this dish is the freshness of the meat (still has to be warm) and I blatantly invited myself to everyone who killed a pig in the village.
In 2005 we started to rent out our first holiday home and we soon found out that there is some demand for a place in the village where guests can eat and meet.
Having discovered the two connecting farmsteads now comprising the Valea Verde, we decided to buy these two ruins, restore them and open a small restaurant. Originally we set out to create a “WineBar '' type of place where one can eat small tapas-like dishes, later we changed our plans due to legal requirements and opted for the restaurant classification - a decision of some consequence ;-)
The concept of the Valea Verde was from the very beginning a community driven one - all employees were and are from the village, we source as many ingredients locally as possible and try to preserve the identity of the place whilst developing it.
So much about my culinary journey in this post, watch out for the next blog post about my “Becoming A Chef” post where I describe why and how I became a chef!
As much as our culinary preferences are defined by childhood taste memories, for me the special importance of restaurants in my life has been profound and defining.
