You feel at home here at Königs, and this feeling is entirely intentional. The directional arrows do not simply point to rooms 506-507 or 501-519, but also to the “King Maximilian I House” and the “Princess Augusta House” or the “King Ludwig I House”. Now you would of course be curious to see what it looks like in the “King Ludwig II House”, but that is not on the program – at least this evening. Or the Wiggerl is at home himself and, being shy as he is, doesn’t want to receive any guests.
The Rosewood Hotel on Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße in Munich’s Kreuzviertel opened last fall, in the Wilhelminian style banking palace of the former Bavarian State Bank, which later became Hypobank. It took seven years for the building to be completely gutted and the inside to be completely rebuilt. Just as the international luxury hotel group Rosewood wanted for its first and so far only hotel in Germany. The hotel chain’s stated goal is to offer the most expensive and best accommodation in every location. Should have been successful in Munich. The suites, named after historical figures from the Bavarian royal family, cost between 14,000 and 15,000 euros. Not per month, which would be quite reasonable even for Munich rents, but per night (the simpler rooms cost around 770 euros).
But you can also just take out a subscription for the spa area. That starts at 4900 euros per month. You don’t just sit in the sauna or have your toenails filed. No, you can also spend the night if it gets too late to drive home to the villa on Tegernsee. Or maybe you would like to go shopping around the corner on Maximilianstrasse the next day.
That evening, Rosewood’s General Manager Roland Dürr invited people to the “Four Hands Dinner” together with the Tantris restaurant to show where they are located in terms of gastronomy. The combined culinary expertise of two chefs is combined. Benjamin Chmura from Tantris has been cooking up two Michelin stars for his gourmet temple right from the start; the Tantris-DNA restaurant in the same building, which is dedicated to the house’s glorious culinary history (and for which Chmura is now also responsible), also has a star. You can’t add it up to three stars. But the fact that Tantris is secretly hoping for a third star when the new Michelin guide for Germany is presented next Tuesday cannot be completely denied.
Matthias Brenner contributes the other two hands to the “Four Hands Dinner”. He runs the kitchen at the restaurant in the Rosewood Hotel. It’s called “Cuvilliés” and the subtitle modestly describes itself as “Brasserie”, which can only be seen as an understatement given the splendor of the slightly lowered basement in the northern part of the building. Brenner previously worked for Edip Sigl at Les Deux, who also had and still has two stars there and now at the Achental golf resort on Lake Chiemsee. The two chefs knew each other briefly from that time.
Hand in hand for dinner: Benjamin Chmura from Tantris and Matthias Brenner, the Rosewood chef.
(Photo: Philipp Maier)
However, Brenner does not have the ambition to earn a star for himself at Cuvilliés. Regional cuisine at a high to very high level is enough for him, and that’s all sorts of things. For the three-course dinner he contributes a salmon trout from the Aumühle in the Isar Valley, with potatoes, watercress and scattered fruit. Which sounds very simple, but when it comes to watercress, for example, it turns out to be a gelled mirror. Chmura brought his pigeon plithiviers, which are small cakes made of puff pastry filled with chicken mousse, duck liver and pigeon as well as black truffle. Patissier Maxime Rebmann (Tantris) contributes the best chocolate and his colleague Shinas Shahida (Cuvilliés) amazing dessert creations such as white mice made from pannacotta or pink truffle pralines, which turn out to be airy cream bombs with a caramel core.
Unfortunately, not all secrets are revealed that evening, for example the code word. There is also a hidden “speakeasy bar” in Cuvilliés that you can only enter if you know the current code word. It’s a little, slightly frivolous gimmick. Because this type of bar was invented during the American Prohibition, when the consumption of alcohol was forbidden. The code word was intended to keep police informers away, but if you had waved a wad of cash you would certainly have been let in. The Rosewood clientele would certainly have no problem waving the banknotes. As a super-rich person, you probably feel a pleasant thrill when you can’t buy everything and are sometimes not allowed in just because you don’t know such a stupid code word.