There are many things that remind Ali Güngörmüs of his childhood. But only one object evokes such intense feelings: the large round oven tray in which the mother cooked every day over the open fire. Börek (stuffed dumplings), sarma (cabbage rolls), kebap and, on special days, lemon chicken with potatoes, spiced yoghurt and vegetables. “It’s still my favorite dish to this day,” says the TV chef and head of the Munich restaurant Pageou. There, in the Fünf Höfe, mother’s stove is still there. It has pride of place in the high-tech kitchen.
Pageou is the name of the village in Anatolia where Güngörmüs grew up as the fourth youngest of seven siblings. The father worked as a welder in Munich, they only saw him during the summer holidays. The family had a small farm, fruit trees, vegetable fields, a few sheep and goats. They made butter and cheese from the milk, and at most one chicken was slaughtered. Whenever the father came. Otherwise there was meat at most on holidays, “three or four times a year.” Then the children would sit around the black, hot plate, and the mother made sure that no arguments broke out over the best pieces. “Meat was a luxury, I don’t eat it often to this day,” says the top chef. “Sustainability, the new buzzword,” he laughs, “that’s what we lived at the time.”
Ali Güngörmüs is a top chef who is also in demand on television. He runs two bars in Munich.
(Photo: Jens Krick/imago images/Future Image)
When Ali Güngörmüs was ten years old, the family moved to his father in Munich. And the son soon had a career goal that he pushed through against the will of his parents: cook. At 19 he ended up with Karl Ederer in the star restaurant Glockenbach, a year later he recommended him to Tantris. He was head chef at Ederer and Lenbach. In Hamburg he opened his first restaurant, Le Canard Nouveau, in 2005 and received a Michelin star himself a year later.
“But I was always homesick there,” says Güngörmüs. His parents and siblings were in Munich, he missed them. “The intimacy when mom calls and says, ‘I made lemon chicken, and then everyone gathers around the table at her place – there’s no substitute for that intimacy.’ In 2014 he opened Pageou in Munich, and in 2022 Pera Meze was added in the Gärtnerplatz district. The parents now live in Turkey again for the greater part of the year. The mother tends her garden there and takes care of the son in Munich. “She sends me dried tomatoes, fruit, homemade jam and dried herbs – they’re just the best.”
When the busy chef – he’s currently filming for a TV series in the USA – tells his children about Anatolia, and he often does, it’s about his mother’s garden, the kitchen, and the warmth radiated by the open fire , the well where the children fetched water. “It was about a kilometer away, so we got our hands on two canisters and started running. We always had to help, but that was quite normal, there were no distractions after school,” he says. His children can hardly believe that he didn’t have a single toy. To do this, the siblings harvested wheat in Pageou, brought the grain to the mill and baked flatbread from the flour – on the upside-down oven tray. A true all-purpose weapon in the kitchen. “Mom cooked everything in it, so I would never give up this good piece.”
In “Favorite Things” people talk about what their hearts are about, what accompanies them through life, what brings them happiness and what they would never part with.