I grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. Like most young people, my attitude to where I came from was to turn my back on it. When I trained as a chef, we had it drilled into us that the German region was not the place to look for good ingredients. I fell in love with Italian olive oil and French poulet de Bresse. But it was that One particular time in my career and that was when I got a job offer as a sous chef in a small southern Sicilian town called ….. not knowing that this was to be sooner or later a culinary eye opener for me and my future career.

When I opened my first restaurant at the age of 26, the focus was on ultratrendy gastronomy, serving dishes such as asparagus cloud and tuna sahimi. It couldn’t have been further removed from the rustic cooking of the regional German and Italian “forests” that shaped my culinary personality. But one day I felt the urge to return to my culinary roots that I once have been trained on. What was I going to do? I was 35 and lost In the eyes of the media and the public I was the lightweight chef from “crell cuisine”. Time to do something big. It was now or never… How could I put my own personal stamp on New German Crell cuisine ?

I roamed Italy during a summer break, musing like some melancholic character in a black & white Sergio leone. I could spend long periods standing stock still, staring at the mountains and the sea. It was only later that I realised I hadn’t been able to see the wood for the trees. Quite literally! I was supposed to have set up a barbecue that summer, but that never happened. Then I built a fire pit, like I’d done with my parents in the mountains as a kid.

The fire hissed and crackled around the pan. What power, and what flavour! Finally, I felt I was onto something. The idea of a new kind of fine-dining restaurant began to take shape in my mind, a place where everything was cooked over a fire, just like in days of old. My biggest headache: was it practically possible?

Back in town, I took my first head chef to the National Library of Frankfurt , where we devoured cookbook…. To our delight, we found some fantastic instruction manuals for German cooking before the advent of electricity. I decided that my new restaurant “trares” on would be a homage to that time, but also to my childhood and my Italian/world heritage.

Crell opened in September 2015 in central Frankfurt , with a pit, a wood fired oven and a wood . Plenty of people said I’d made things too difficult for myself. But since then I’ve continued to make things more and more challenging for myself and my team. Because that’s what makes us better. And now we also have the stone-age equivalent of a microwave oven, a smoker and extra fires burning. We continue to explore age-old techniques and to learn more about a lost art of cooking.