Farm restaurants: From Plant to Plate

 
 
The programme they offer is not only an emotional contrast for stressedout city-dwellers: farm restaurants and cafés – romantic rural retreats, oases of peace out in the country, idyllic theme and event locations, from simple farmhouse fare to – ever more frequently – dishes of great culinary sophistication. They stand for authenticity, security, for honest craftsmanship and traceability, often going hand in hand with a philosophy that is rooted in ecology. For operators, gastronomy becomes an integral part of the value creation chain that is the farm, typically combined with a farm shop – the keyword here is direct marketing. Not a new phenomenon, foodservice in its rural ambience is more perfectly than ever in tune with the spirit of the times: farm restaurants are flourishing all over Europe. Therefore, the next Hot Trend section (issue 2/2012) will be devoted to this subject, too, with more exemplary projects from various European countries.
 
A pioneer in the direct marketing of its own products via catering and on-the-spot sales is the Mechtildshausen Domain (Domäne Mechtildshausen) on the outskirts of Wiesbaden, Hesse’s capital. The estate – since 1992 a certified Bioland farm – has around 185 hectares of acreage on the domain itself (plus another 450 hectares at other near-by locations). The visitor can expect a world of different experiences that include three farm shops, a restaurant, a café and wine bar as well as a hotel with conference rooms, and a splendid inner courtyard richly decorated with floral displays.
The domain’s restaurant (seating for 60) welcomes the guests with Mediterranean flair and an exquisite award-winning cuisine, accompanied by wines from top German and French vineyards. (Main courses V17-24, Menus V33-45). Wines can also be savoured in the rural ambience of the wine bar, located in the former stables. The Café Bohne serves home-made tarts and cakes. Almost all the ingredients used, whether beef, pork or poultry, sausage and eggs, fruit and vegetables, lettuce and potatoes, pastries, cheese and other dairy produce,are from the domain’s own range of organic products. There is a butcher’s shop where guests can buy Charolais beef that comes straight from cattle bred on the estate, a cheese shop offering home-made cheeses, and a baker’s shop with cakes and bread baked on the premises.
There is also a large market hall offering a wide variety of vegetables, fruit, homemadejuices and jams. Here, visitors can also find a large number of organic products from other producers, as well as a broad selection of organically grown wines. The domain, which can look back on a long tradition, is the property of the State of Hesse and has been leased to Wiesbaden’s Youth Workshop (Wiesbadener Jugendwerkstatt) since 1987.The organisation offers vocational training for socially disadvantaged young people and adults – many of them can complete a traineeship on the estate or find employment there. www.mechtildshausen.de

 
Some 30 kilometres from Munich is one of the most spectacular pioneering projects in the field of sustainable agriculture. The project, the Hermannsdorfer Landwerkstätten, has attracted a great deal of attention far beyond Germany’s borders. It was established in 1986 by Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth, the former boss of Herta, at the time Europe’s biggest industrial sausage producer with sales amounting to around DM1.5 bn. After the sale of Herta, Schweisfurth acquired a 100-year-old listed agricultural estate, where he began to implement his vision of setting up an enterprise that was planned and realised on ecological principles from the ground up. Although often ridiculed at the time, since then it has proved to be a success economic - ally and serves as a model for many similar projects. What started out as Germany’s first organic pig farm (with its famous breed of Swabian-Hall pig), has meanwhile developed into a regional network of around 70 organic farmers. The grounds of the estate now contain a nursery, a butcher’s shop, a raw milk cheese dairy, a mill, a natural sourdough bakery and a brewery. The products are marketed in the farm shop and in the so far eleven Hermannsdorfer subsidiaries in and around Munich, two of them with their own bistro. The produce is meanwhile also sold to third parties (organic food shops, restaurants, organic supermarkets ...). On the estate itself, there is a market café, an organic beer garden and the Wirtshaus zum Herrmannsdorfer Schweinsbräu, a restaurant that combines elegance and rusticity, and where the host, Thomas Thielemann, and his team serve up a seasonal cuisine based on the products of the region to guests with the very highest expectations of quality.
www.herrmannsdorfer.de, www.schweinsbraeu.de
 

 
| 15 December 2011 | Marianne Wachholz |