The veranda at Atelier Moessmer
Chef Norbert Niederkofler is perhaps the only chef in Italy who doesn’t cook with olive oil or lemon. His “local and seasonal” mindset goes far beyond the usual culinary mantra, and those staples don’t exist in his homeland. Northern and mountainous, Italy’s Dolomite mountains have more in common with Austria than Rome.
And so, the chef has gone all-in on his Cook the Mountain philosophy—in 2020, he published a beautiful book of the same name—working with only what can be found in his immediate surroundings and, increasingly, using techniques that would have been more at home in a grandmother’s house a century ago than in a Michelin kitchen a decade ago. He held to it and honed it as his restaurant, St. Hubertus in the Rosa Alpina (now an Aman hotel) in Alta Badia, ascended the culinary recognition ladder.
He remembers the realization that his international clients were accustomed to finding the best of haute cuisine everywhere. He wanted instead to offer something they could find only in South Tyrol. Later on, he remembers the powers that be warning him that his relentlessly local, ancestral approach “didn’t seem very Michelin.”
He ignored them. St. Hubertus earned its third Michelin star in 2017.
The new spring salad with wild strawberry juice
The restaurant held it (along with an increasingly important green one) until his departure last year, when the restaurant closed for a renovation and a sort of Kismet opportunity landed him in his lap. The beautiful old villa next to his home in Brunico—a place he had looked at for years—came onto the market.
Within six months of opening last summer, his new Atelier Moessmer was awarded three more Michelin stars.
Along with this unusually quick recognition, it also pulled in another green one. This means quite a lot to Niederkofler, who brands himself as the Ethical Chef, created a university degree program in mountain enogastronomic sciences, and organizes an international symposium dedicated to ethical and sustainable cooking.
Lukas Gerges, Norbert Niederkofler and Mauro Siega
Villa Moessmer, which dates from 1890, became a perfect venue for a fully freestanding expression of Niederkofler’s gastronomic vision. Because the house was heavily protected—the windows, the ceilings, even the scratches on the floor, says restaurant manager and head sommelier Lukas Gerges—they got permission to build a separate kitchen in a glass cube that’s an extension of the villa.
It's a visual nod to the restaurant’s combination of history and modernity. The house was once the residence of the owner of the Moessmer textile company, the region’s oldest producer of loden fabric and a collaborator with haute couture brands. In recent years, the company allowed South Tyrolean writer Joseph Zoderer to work there. He wrote a book longhand and hung pages on the walls.
“We didn’t want to make a classic restaurant,” says Gerges. “We wanted to make it a home.” Guests ring a bell when they arrive—“like ringing a friend’s door”—and are ushered into a cozy living room with armchairs in front of a fireplace, archival photographs on the walls, and old fabric samples here and there. A glass of champagne or house-made apple kombucha is proffered.
Complicated to prepare, easy to eat
From there, there are several small dining rooms, but the best seats in the house are the 12 barstools at the counter surrounding the open kitchen in the new glass box. There, executive chef Mauro Siega and his team execute a hushed gastronomic ballet in which they make the art of elevated cooking look easy.
And in fact, it’s anything but. Everything is done the old-fashioned way. Some decades ago, Niederkofler was one of the first chefs in the region to embrace sous-vide cooking and at one point had a dozen machines. Now there’s nothing of the sort, not even a modern oven. Proteins are cooked over fire, sometimes going in and out ten times to achieve the perfect level of done-ness.
Those proteins come into the restaurant in the form of whole animals, and every part of each fish, bird or mammal gets used. There are aging cellars, fermentation rooms and all manner of tools for preserving vegetables. Bakers in a pastry room make the desserts as well as the fancy-fermentation bread used here and at Niederkofler’s nearby mountaintop venture, AlpINN.
The old villa and its modern glass kitchen
“We don’t ask our farmers to grow anything for us,” says Siega. Rather, “the farmers tell us what they have.”
That means the kitchen team is both improvisational and far-sighted. One of the three pillars of Niederkofler’s Cook the Mountain philosophy is seasonality—something that’s a nice idea everywhere but not so simple to execute in snowy Alpine winters.
Summer is easy; sometimes the kitchen is empty as all the chefs are out foraging. The rest comes from nearby organic farmers, with whom the team is on a first-name basis. But only 10% of what comes in gets used in the moment. The rest is frozen, dried, fermented or otherwise preserved. “We have to decide in the spring or summer about what we will need in the winter. This is nothing new,” says Siega, in whose hands it seems somewhat revolutionary. “This is very much back to the past.”
Winter flavors on the menu
He repeats the other two pillars: a rigorous insistence on mountain produce—no oysters, no lobster, no Wagyu, no citrus, no ocean fish, no olive oil, no vanilla or chocolate or cinnamon—and the zero-waste thing; even the fish scales get used.
While this may sound like a recipe for rather joyless dining, the opposite is true. Mountain herbs sing with flavor. Sorrel, sea buckthorn and white currant provide acidity. Butter and hundreds of herb oils add richness. And in the right hands, the weird parts of animals taste delicious.
These are the right hands. The tasting menu is a series of simple dishes with complex flavors. You can seek to understand the elements of each plate if you wish, but it’s not the sort of cerebral fine-dining wizardry that requires a great deal of concentration to enjoy. It’s an intricate meal of uncomplicated pleasures.
Obviously, it’s a menu that changes often, but standouts from an early February lunch included pike perch smørrebrød with dollops of fermented flavors, smoked potato tortel (fritter) with cheese that’s been aged in a former bunker in the mountain, a winter salad with preserved vegetables and beetroot petals shaped into a rose, tender hot-smoked trout with red berries, and a classic dish (since 2014) of melt-in-your-mouth beetroot gnocchi with black crumbs of beer bread, daikon cream and a horseradish flavor that tickles your nose.
The sleek kitchen inside the glass cube
Since the new spring menu debuted yesterday, a representative dish is now Siega’s spring salad with albi-curd and macerated wild strawberry juice. He says, “This dish is born to give space to the blooming spring, giving us its first ingredients. [It’s a] salad composed of vegetables preserved in spring flower syrup, sour berries, fresh and candied fruits and vegetables. At the base, there is a cream of apricots from our farmers, which we have preserved and transformed into juice.
“[It’s a] pre-dessert that, just like nature, changes with every spoonful, expressing the acidic, fruity and vegetable notes that are coordinated thanks to the essence obtained from the infusion of juice created with the first wild strawberries from the woods."
Taken together, the menu is a lot, but it’s not overwhelming. The flavors are dazzling but not to the point of exhaustion. Gerges keeps the dining room running as smoothly as the kitchen—while pouring an inventive selection of wines and a few thoughtful non-alcoholic beverages for some of the pairings—and the place lives up to that Dolomites promise of Italian dolce vita with German efficiency. Nothing is overkill, and it never feels like an endurance contest. Guests end up back beside the fireplace, with their apple cider donuts and coffee, only about three hours after they’ve arrived.
