I eat a vegan menu for 225 euros – then something weird happens

I am nervous. My green experiment starts in three hours. For the first time in my life I will eat a vegan menu – supposedly “the best in the world” – in the 2-star restaurant “Lafleur” at the entrance to the Palmengarten in Frankfurt am Main.

So vegan food. Peas, Cauliflower, Celery. Just for me, a self-confessed meat eater! I hope I’ll have enough. For the price you can expect that though. 225 euros for seven courses. Without drinks. Pooh.

Doner stalls, steakhouses and burger temples lure left and right. I stand my ground. “Not today,” I tell myself, although I’m plagued by hunger.

225 euros for seven vegan courses. Without drinks. Pooh

Shortly after five. Gray skies, drizzle. Officially, the “Lafleur” won’t open for another hour, but I’m already allowed in. Restaurant manager Boris Häbel, who worked in Munich’s “Tantris” and in Berlin’s “Adlon”, takes my umbrella and coat off. Very friendly. Not as stiff as I thought.

Shortly afterwards I’m sitting opposite the man whom many gourmets worship as a kind of god: Star chef Andreas Krolik, 48 years old, double-breasted jacket with rolled-up sleeves in bright white, high forehead, striking face.

Our first topic: the GDR. Like me, Krolik is from the East. He likes to think of his childhood and youth back, he says. “A very nice time.”

He grew up in Erdeborn, a village in Saxony-Anhalt, rural idyll, pure nature. The family keeps pigs, chickens, geese and has three large gardens “full of fruit and vegetables”. Everything that comes to the table is fresh and genuine in taste. A formative experience for Krolik.

Meat is only available on Sundays. Slaughtered twice a year. Krolik has been there since he was a child. He learns early on how lovingly you have to treat animals. How fantastic old strawberry varieties taste. And what nature gives back to you if you treat it gently and with respect.

Actually, he wants to be a forester. But with the fall of the wall, the dream was shattered. Without further ado, the then 16-year-old decided to become a chef. He doesn’t get an apprenticeship in the East, but a restaurant in the West is applying for it.

In the summer of 1991, right after graduating from secondary school, Krolik drove to the Black Forest with his parents. A planned trial day in the hotel restaurant becomes a trial week. It is the beginning of a meteoric career.

Andreas Krolik: From secondary school to the hotel kitchen

The young East German cooks up. He ends up in renowned houses such as “Brenners Park Hotel” in Baden-Baden and the “Tigerpalast” in Frankfurt. In 2015 he switched to “Lafleur”, which is one of the 200 best restaurants in the world. The Michelin Guide awards its cuisine two stars. Gault & Millau named him “Chef of the Year 2017”.

Andreas Krolik, who prepares meat and fish at the highest level, is famous for his purely vegetable dishes. As early as 2002, when there was still no trend, he put a vegetarian menu on the menu, followed later by a vegan one. From year to year he refines it, wins more and more fans, convinces critics.

Recently, the US magazine “Forbes” praised Krolik’s green creations as “the best vegan menu in the world“.

So the experts are excited.

But can the high-end chef also convince people like me? People who consider salad on the plate to be dispensable and who are ignored by all the vegan hype?

Actually nothing for meat eaters – and yet fascinating

In the next three hours I will eat the following seven dishes:

1. Curry cauliflower with piquillo gel, radishes, medlar, citrus marinade and wild herbs
2. Fried white asparagus from Burggräfenrode, shiitake bouillon, mildly smoked beetroot, spinach
3. Spiced carrot, tandoori carrot stock, spring leek, carrot cress, Bickert’s chickpeas, macadamia crunch
4. Green asparagus from Pertuis prepared in two ways, artichoke, morel raviolo, morel jus
5. Leek hearts from the oven, young celery and garden peas with truffle jus,
   Hazelnut Quinoa Crunch, Mint Oil
6. Rhubarb processed differently with vanilla elderflower cream, sorrel ice cream with pistachio and salted almond crumble
7. Pickled mango with coconut mousse, exotic fruit sorbet, cocoa sprinkles and mango lassi with mint oil

What can I say? I never would have thought it possible how fantastic vegetables can taste. Spicy, tart, fruity, hot, sweet – and all on one plate, sometimes even with one bite. I experience what experts call “taste explosions”. The cooking points are ideal, perfectly seasoned, beautifully composed.

Some kitchens at this level offer their delicacies in different states of aggregation and thus rely on surprising effects, you could also say: on show. Here it is different. Honest craftsmanship rules here. in perfection.

I have never noticed such intense aromas

I can see everything on the plate. Cauliflower looks like cauliflower, asparagus like asparagus, a carrot like a carrot. No marvels from the outside. But the taste! I have never noticed such intense aromas. I remember what Andreas Krolik said about his philosophy, about things that are most important to him in cooking: “taste, taste, taste”.

As a child in the GDR, he liked what he picked “when perfectly ripe” from bushes and trees. “In the past, you didn’t harvest things to let them ripen for three or four weeks and then sell them, as is the case with imported products,” says Krolik. Even today, he still relies on the genuine taste of fruit and vegetables that “tastes perfect just the way it is”.

And where does he find that? In the region. At gardeners and vegetable farmers in Frankfurt-Oberrad, in the Wetterau, in Nieder-Erlenbach. There are “the best strawberries you can buy,” says the chef from “Lafleur”. They cost five times as much as on the market. “But they are worth it.” Andreas Krolik: “A good piece of fruit or a good vegetable can cost as much per kilo as a good piece of meat.”

The master collects spruce sprouts and wild garlic in the forest

“I buy fresh every day,” says the top chef. At his greengrocer’s, he can also take “hand-selected small quantities” with him, and someone brings him wild herbs to the restaurant. Sometimes Krolik goes into the forest himself to collect spruce sprouts or wild garlic leaves, which he then uses in his dishes. “I just did that again the day before yesterday.”

The freshness, the originality – you taste it and lean back in fascination and amazement. With each of the seven “official” dishes on the menu, but also with the three “greetings from the kitchen”.

Even before things really get going, I’m served something delicious to get in the mood, namely a “soup of yellow lentils from Bruchenbrücken, curry-ginger foam and baked olive polenta limequat and truffle cream”. This is followed by a “Battered Kohlrabi, Green Bean Kombucha Marinade, Cilantro Mayonnaise and Avocado”.

In the last entrée before dessert I find the fresh spruce sprouts that Master Krolik collected himself.

While I enjoy the candlelight and gentle piano music and make notes after each course (“Asparagus – firm bite, ideal”, “Morel jus – very strong, spicy”, “Rhubarb – it doesn’t get any better than that”) the starred restaurant fills up.

A couple in their forties, who are not here for the first time, ordered the vegan menu as I did and seemed equally impressed. The other guests: a family with three older children, three British businessmen, two other couples and a prominent German television entertainer, who first quenches his thirst with a “Radeberger” beer, but then switches to fine wine with his companions and himself feast on Krolik’s delicacies.

No desire for meat. Is something wrong with me?

Even if I see pieces of tender pink lamb, an Etouffée pigeon and roast on plates at neighboring tables norwegian Spy Norway lobster – I have no desire for meat or fish. Is something wrong with me? I `m ill?

Andreas Krolik probably achieved his goal with me. He wants to prepare vegan dishes so perfect, so exciting and so varied “that the guest doesn’t miss anything and doesn’t waste a thought on meat, fish or seafood”. About a quarter of all connoisseurs who come to “Lafleur” in Frankfurt’s Palmengarten order the vegan menu, 75 percent prefer the traditional one. Both cost the same.

By the way, my worry that I wouldn’t be able to get enough was over after the third course. And yet I feel light, even after the espresso at the end of my green experiment. I look again into the kitchen, where Andreas Krolik, together with nine chefs and three apprentices, is working on the last dishes of the evening.

Actually, it can only go down now. A pity

“It was great,” I say thank you. “If vegan dishes were always this good, I would think about giving up meat in the future.” Andreas Krolik smiles contentedly. But we both know that this evening was an exception. My entry into the vegan world was at the very highest level. In fact, it can only go down now.

But do I really want that? Do I want vegetable dishes below this level on the plate? I doubt. As a precaution, I announce that I will probably eat Thuringian Roster again soon and stop by my favorite kebab shop.

Andreas Krolik laughs. “That’s not bad, Thuringian rosters taste very good. And every now and then I also eat a doner kebab.”