November 23, 2019

Married for 17 years and in Europe. What to do??? Maybe a weekend getaway...maybe next year. How about the next big thing? Yes! Find a Michelin Star Restaurant in Germany. Ok, how about something really close? Options? Lots of them. There's about two dozen Michelin Star Restaurants near our home.

Step 1. We had to choose a restaurant, after researching a few choices, we settled on Die Brasserie. According to their website, it looked like a good restaurant. Here is the website Die Brasserie. It received a Michelin Star for the last 3 years. Excitement filled the atmosphere. How great is that! To eat at a Michelin Star Restaurant.

Happy 17th Year Anniversary, we told each other. We got ready and left our house in Otterberg at 12:15pm. Our reservation was at 2pm. It took us about 1 hour to get to the Pirmasens. The restaurants is right off the road, in back of the restaurant is a forest. It was a nice Fall day, about 40 degrees, the sun was out.

As we entered the restaurant, there we lots of empty seats which meant some privacy. Upon observation, we noticed a large party, a smaller party, and a couple. Our host was a nice German guy. He knew some English which helped us. His assistance, 2 of them a young lady and young man also spoke some English. Our host explained to us the menu, they only had it in German, but we we previewed it online beforehand and knew what we wanted; the 5 Gänge Menu which translates to 5 Course Menu. In America it translates to a prix fixe menu.

We were offered champagne to start off. It took some time for our host to explain it to us, but after about 1 minute of explaining we were able to get on the same page. This may have turned him off to us though as probably in his mind taking the time to explain things in English would be a non priority because he had to deal with 2 parties. After all that, we figured that it was a regional champagne from Landau. The taste was good nothing to write home about and got me a little tipsy. To our surprise we were offered a venison consommé with bread and a cheese spread. The consommé broth had a ton of flavor, it was like the bones of the deer extracted all the juice into that soup. The German bread was a wheat bread and the cheese spread was like a light sour cream. Michelle was hooked!

The first course came, it was a white truffle potato soup with spinach and egg yolk. This is the famous Alba truffles from Alba Italy. Usually truffles are black, but these white ones are considered the crème de la crème of truffles. With the bread, it became a good dipping sauce. We soaked it up! The second course was the bean and pear soup with bacon. This was hands down Michelle's favorite. It had the taste of bean but with the sweetness of pear. Course 3 was the monkfish with mustard seeds on top and beets. I'm thinking this was their best dish. It had good balance of the chewiness of the monkfish along with the mustard seeds and beet sauce. The 4th course, Michelle did not like, it was venison with some kind of cream covering with cabbage, cranberry and a pepper sauce. Michelle did not like the texture, it was raw as anything. I read that it was sous vide, it was sous vide to raw, LOL. I approached it as experimental so I made my mind up to enjoy it. Michelle couldn't finish and gave the rest of her dish to me. The grand finale was dessert. It taste like ice cream with a sesame seed cookie topped with apple chutney. The ice cream tasted like light cream. Overall we had a wonderful anniversary meal.

Critique: Our servers were attentive, but didn't really explain the dishes, I believe our host was turned off at the beginning because he had to try so hard to explain the champagne. But that's okay. I get it. I mean could I explain something in German? No. That was the only major critique I can think of. On a side note, the bill came out to about €217. They did not accept Visa card and we did not bring our German debit card, so Michelle had to drive down the road to an atm (geldautomat). This took about 20 minutes, our host apologized to us which was nice. We ended leaving an €18 tip. We weren't sure what the etiquette was for tipping in a Michelin Star Restaurant. Usually at a fancy restaurant in Hawaii, we would tip 20-23%, but we weren't sure about Europe, it is different. Also I was curious if we could use a VAT form, but we didn't bring one, so the question remains.

Was it worth it? Yes it was! To eat at a Michelin Star Restaurant is so worth it.