The times when the ingredients of individual dishes were described in a flowery manner on menus and linked together with words such as “on” or “on” are long gone. Today, chefs tend to do the taciturn opposite. All you have to do is tell you which raw materials are combined in a meal. The menus in their restaurants have turned into material lists on which the components of a dish are strictly separated by dots or slashes, as if they should never come together on the plate.
The Manu restaurant is a good example of the fact that this new sobriety does not have to hinder a chef, but on the contrary can inspire special achievements. The name Manu (Latin: by hand) is supposed to suggest something of the traditional craftsmanship that arose in the previous restaurant, the Walter & Benjamin restaurant, which was developed from a wine shop. The new landlord and his cook seem to identify intensely with this tradition and this commitment to objectivity.
If you read the string of the words “Burrata / Orange / Almond / Basil / Peperoni” on the very clear menu, you are at first as perplexed as after reading the election manifesto of a German party. But when you then experience how the victuals, which point in very different flavors and which are combined with each other in this starter, lure each other out of reserve on the plate, even incite them to something big, then you understand what the additive principle can achieve in culinary terms : Almost with every spoon that is dipped into the creamy mass of the burrata, the Italian cream cheese, other substances are taken away from the colored mosaic composed above; so no bite tastes exactly the same; you can make discoveries until the end. Sometimes the orange comes to the fore, sometimes the basil, sometimes the peppers (14 euros).
Soupy soft collide with grainy hard elements
The chef who works “by hand” does not strictly adhere to the taste canon that his star-famous German colleagues or the high priests of East Asian kitchens have established when combining common materials. He seems to attach particular importance to the haptic-tactile stimuli that can be generated in the mouth with different consistencies. In many of his compositions, soupy soft and grainy hard, hearty, bite-proof and crispy cracking elements collide. The mashed potatoes that were served with the three delicious Salzburg blood sausages and the onion vegetables were also remembered because of the toasted breadcrumbs that were sprinkled on top and were pleasantly noticeable on the tongue (18 euros).
On his menu of the day, the chef likes to put a meat-free dish at the end of the main course, which is highly recommended not only because of its moderate price. In the two examples that we tried, three basic elements of Italian cuisine were each combined in such a way that they became a delicacy.
On one plate, polenta was pushed together to form a flat volcanic mound; hot, liquid Taleggio cheese floated in its crater; on the flanks of the mountain, however, light brown truffle cream flowed down as lava. If you mixed the three optically inconspicuous, almost uniformly soft and white fabrics with a spoon, small miracles of good taste emerged that you have never experienced with these materials (20).
The dish, in which Fregola Sarda, i.e. the lentil- and ball-shaped pasta from Sardinia, merged with chopped fresh mushrooms and black truffle slices to form a characteristic unit, also reached a similar level (20).
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s restaurant review “Tasting” has a long tradition: it has been published weekly in the local section since 1975, and for several years also online and with a rating scale. About a dozen editors with culinary experience from all departments – from Munich, knowledge to politics – take turns writing about the city’s gastronomy. The choice is endless, the Bavarian economy is just as important as the Greek fish restaurant, the American fast food chain, the special bratwurst stand or the gourmet restaurant decorated with stars. The special thing about the SZ tasting: The authors write under pseudonyms, often with a culinary touch. You go undetected to the restaurant to be tested about two to three times, depending on how long the budget set by the editorial team lasts. Iron basic rules: a hundred days grace period until the kitchen of a new restaurant has settled in. And: Never get caught working as a restaurant critic – so that you can describe food and drink, service and atmosphere in an unbiased manner. SZ
The riddle that the line “Cod / Porcini / Broccoli / Spinach / Paprika” posed was solved in a similarly harmonious and pleasurable way when eating as the mystery proclaimed in the line below: “Lamb / Savoy Cabbage / Blueberry / Mushroom”. Both the cod and the lamb were carefully cooked on their own and only then combined on the plate with the very differently prepared ingredients.
The words “rosy” and “tender”, which one can hardly avoid when judging well-treated lamb, got a special luminosity when eating the saddle of lamb in Manu. The blueberries served with it had previously been pickled slightly sour and thus brought a surprising punch line to the familiar juxtaposition of lamb, savoy cabbage and mushrooms (28).
Since the Manu restaurant, like its predecessor, also sees itself as a wine bar, you can try a different wine with each course and dare to take a detour into the new world of unfiltered natural wines. With their sometimes almost rough idiosyncrasy, these wines go amazingly well with the house’s cooking style.
Address: Rumfordstraße 1, 80469 Munich, Telephone: 089/26024174, www.manu-muenchen.de, Opening times: Monday to Friday 5pm to midnight, Saturday 12pm to midnight