If the Wall hadn’t fallen, Marco Müller would have hung up his chef’s jacket. And Berlin might still have to wait for its first three-star restaurant. The story of a rebellious chef who modernized Michelin-starred cuisine to suit it.
Marco Müller was born where great German cinema is created: Babelsberg. Great cinema is also what the chef puts on the plate. He, too, tells stories – local stories in which the focus is on the products and regionality serves as a common thread. And which a few years ago nobody wanted to hear, let alone taste. They didn’t fit the tight corset that constricted star cuisine for a long time. But Müller, the enfant terrible, questioned the status quo and stirred up the illustrious circle of gourmet traditionalists with his ideas of sustainable regional cuisine. “At that time we symbolized the young savages who were ready to change something,” he recalls. The kitchen revolutionaries, including Michael Hoffmann and Billy Wagner, prevailed and established what Müller calls a new Berlin idea. Müller has now cooked up three Michelin stars – as the only one in the whole of Berlin.
Müller is a free spirit, someone who thinks against the grain. That was always the case, it even cost him his high school diploma in the GDR. His views were too modern, he says, and well, the grades were too bad, too. He wanted to be an artist, but became a chef – and if the turning point hadn’t come, he probably wouldn’t have stayed there for long. Because in the East you couldn’t choose where to cook, what to cook and Müller, he was put in a large canteen, which the seditious youngster didn’t like. He went to the barricades until he was allowed to go. Then came Berlin, the fall of the Wall and star cuisine.
Pioneer for regional star cuisine
For the first time he felt that he had found a place where he belonged. There he found people who didn’t just cook for sustenance, but for passion. “A completely new world opened up to me with star gastronomy,” he says. Müller’s career at star level began in the “Grand Slam” restaurant, that was in 1996. It was a time that shaped him. The kitchen was incredibly creative. There are many people who are technically perfect, but who simply lack the idea, says Müller. You can eat well with them. “But I love going into a restaurant and experiencing something unique: that something was created there, with products or with a coherent idea that also has this terroir.”
Marco Müller has cooked in the “Schlosshotel im Grunewald”, in the Kempinski Hotel Bristol, in the “Intercontinental”, in the “Alten Zollhaus” in Berlin, in the “Schlosshotel Bühlerhöhe” in the Black Forest, in the “Harlekin” in Berlin and in the “Windspiel” in the castle Hubertushöhe Storkow. Müller’s years of wandering in the capital came to an end at the age of 34. In 2004 he found a place to work in “Rutz”, to which he has remained true to this day. He got his first Michelin star there in 2007, his second in 2017 and his third in 2020. On top of that, there was the green star for sustainability. “We got everything we could from Michelin,” says the top chef. And that, although or precisely because Müller does not play according to the rules of traditional star cuisine.
Anyone who would like to try one of Marco Müller’s dishes will find the recipe for “Garum Tomate Kalbskopf” (picture) in the anthology of portraits “Three stars: More is not possible” by Isolde Heinz and Gunnar Meinhardt,
© Ricarda Spiegel
“We wanted to change something”
“We didn’t want to please or function, we wanted to create something new, change something,” he says. In order to find his signature in the kitchen, the chef first had to forget everything he had previously learned. He erased evaluation criteria from his head. In the “Rutz” there are no tablecloths and no silver cutlery, and the main products that belong to the canon of star cuisine are ignored. The regional comes to the fore. What is currently highly modern has long been cultivated by Müller. For years he has been roaming through the forest, looking where nobody else looks, to always find new products. Blossoms. Leaves. Berry. “In the meantime I’ve eaten my way through the whole forest, always armed with my mobile phone so that I know what I’m putting in my mouth,” he says. He likes to experiment. The kitchen is his playground, that’s where he lets off steam. “And it satisfies my curiosity to set myself tasks that other people sometimes flinch at.”
Unconventional, a bit radical, high class. Müller was once smiled at for his culinary views and approaches, today he is a role model. With his three stars, he is one of Germany’s best chefs and he still has big plans. Especially when it comes to working with farmers, farmers, producers, they are still a long way from reaching their goal, he says. “We’ve only just scratched the shell of what’s possible.”
Isolde Heinz and Gunnar Meinhardt have more about Marco Müllers and the other three-star chefs, how they tick and what drives them in the Portrait Collection “Three Stars: More is not possible” written down. The quotes are taken from the book.
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