I remember driving a Ford Fiesta in Germany ten years ago. It vibrated like a spin dryer, smelled like the Central Line in a heatwave and could barely do 100mph on the Autobahn. I think I was overtaken by a family in a van. But it was alright because the car was a rental. In fact, everyone knew that it was a rental as the rental car company’s advertisement was plastered on the doors in big bold red letters. And because the price was also plastered in big bold letters, everyone between Luxembourg and Frankfurt knew I paid EUR29 per day.
It was a great trip, which no one in their right mind would have done. Yes, there were three Michelin-starred restaurants like Waldhotel Sonnora (see further below), but we had to scrimp on everything else. Before dinner, we chugged a bottle of sparkling water to avoid the restaurant upcharge. We then returned to a charming backpackers’ hostel before flying back to Luton on Ryanair.
This time around – older, fatter, and definitely not wiser – my friends and I decided to return to southwest Germany. We would stop at some fine spots along the way – Lake Lausanne, the Black Forest, the Mosel Valley, the Orval Trappist Brewery and Dunkirk. It was a 2,000-mile road trip of epic proportions, and these were some of the highlights I would recommend.
Bernard Antony
Fromagerie Antony is a cheese shop in the Alsatian village of Vieux-Ferrette. To get there, we had to load the car onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle, drive through Normandy and Champagne country, stop for a quick bite (read: an entire rotisserie chicken) in the centre of Dijon, then drive for another two hours into the south of Alsace where all the road signs seemed to lead to Germany. When we finally arrived, forty-five minutes late, I was expecting John Cleese in a fake moustache to tell me that they had run out of cheese.
This visit was all completely unnecessary because Fromagerie Antony sells their cheeses to many great three Michelin-starred restaurants, and also Sketch in London. Admittedly, there were some specials, such as a Comté aged for 60 months in the cellars behind the shop and an extremely funky and savoury soft cheese that I could not believe was Camembert. While we nibbled on a selection of expertly-aged cheese in the oak-panelled tasting room, a friendly elderly gentleman ambled in to offer us some local table wine.
Except, of course, the wine was an exquisite 2005 Trimbach Clos St Hune and the elderly gentleman was the peerless proprietor Bernard Antony himself. We only realised this because pictures of Mr Antony lined the walls of the tasting room. Presidents Mitterand and Macron both feature in them, heaping awards on the best cheesemaker in the world. He sat down and drank with us, recounting tales of his adventures. While we were leaving after buying all the red Burgundy in his cellar, Mr Antony handed us a thumb drive filled with pictures and videos of his proudest achievements.
Hôtel de Ville, Crissier
We had to make haste leaving Alsace as dinner was in Switzerland, a country where the motorway speed cameras seem to outnumber the trees. None of us wanted to be late for dinner at Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville in Crissier, a satellite town of Lausanne, one of only four three-star restaurants in the country.
Helmed by Chef Frank Giovanni, Hôtel de Ville is a classical French restaurant where the portions are enormous and the wine hilariously expensive. The roast chicken dish was, well, an entire roast chicken. It arrived at the same time as a dover sole the size of my forearm. Both were carved and served tableside while everyone else who ordered tasting menus looked on with jealousy and regret. A dish of veal sweetbreads turned out to be two fist-sized monstrosities, topped with a foamy cep sauce for good measure.
There was enough food to go around, so the maitre d’hôtel kindly provided us with small plates and told us that we were free to share our dishes with each other, as long as the kitchen was kept in the dark. Just as we thought we had got away with it, Chef Giovanni appeared, having spotted the offensive concoction of sauces on the dishes leaving our table. In a state that appeared to be bemusement and shock, he marched himself over to say hello.
After ascertaining that our intentions were benign, and impressing us with his intensity, we were allowed to have dessert. The standout was a soufflé the size of a casserole. Unlike any other restaurant on earth, Hôtel de Ville only serves the part of the soufflé that emerges from the ramekin. Then again, why not?
Frogs’ legs and truffle at Waldhotel Sonnora
The soufflé at Hôtel de Ville, Crissier
Trout from Hotel Bareiss’ trout farm
Hotel Bareiss, Baiersbronn
The next day, after establishing that there was only one good café in the city of Lausanne, we departed for Baiersbronn in the Black Forest. Dinner was at the similarly French three-star restaurant at the Hotel Bareiss, a thousand Euro a night Grand Budapest Hotel. Naturally, we stayed next door.
The Bareiss restaurant had surprisingly good service for this part of Germany. Apparently, the current state of affairs only came to be with the installation of air conditioning four years ago. We ordered our third roast chicken in two days, foie gras and venison from the Bareiss estate. Even though each dish was reasonably-sized, Bareiss made up for this otherwise unforgivable sensibility by serving multiple smaller dishes as part of each course; there was barely enough room for everything on the dining table.
After hours, the hotel bar turned into the most exclusive pensioners’ recreation room I had ever seen. It was decorated in the style of the Gilded Age by someone who had only read about it in a Fitzgerald novel. An actual Countess sat at the bar, making love to her tonic and gin. There was a comfortable cigar lounge, whose only other occupant was an executive who chain-smoked Gauloises and claimed to be French. Where in France was he from? “Frankfurt-au-Main”, he scoffed insouciantly.
About ten minutes’ drive from the hotel, Bareiss also owns its own trout farm, the Forellenhof. The on-site restaurant is naturally trout-focused, serving trout freshly beaten to death with a stick by a maniacal German that same morning. I made sure to order the Black Forest cake, which was so indulgently boozy it would have incapacitated the uninitiated.
At this point in the trip, the moveable feast was starting to take its toll. Fortunately, we allowed ourselves a day in the healing thermal waters of nearby Baden-Baden before heading off to the Mosel Valley.
Waldhotel Sonnora, Dreis
Waldhotel Sonnora is one of two great restaurants in the Mosel region, alongside Victor’s Fine Dining by Christian Bau which was closed for a spring break. It is also, as the name suggests, a hotel. Anyone dining at the restaurant is recommended to stay there not just because dinner takes four hours, but also to take advantage of the reasonably-priced wine list. Even though the original chef, Helmut Thieltges, had passed away in 2017, his successor and former sous-chef Clemens Rambichler has managed to retain the restaurant’s three Michelin stars while keeping the spirit of Thieltges’ cooking alive.
Unlike at Bareiss, where the amuse-bouches’ Asian influences seemed to be dreamt up while the chef was stoned and watching a Martin Yan cooking show, Waldhotel Sonnora combined European and Japanese flavours. The bread was excellent too. Instead of limp sourdough which many restaurants in London now list as a course in its own right, Sonnora presented a magnificent array of breads and pastries in a Cristofle trolley. I had seven brioche buns. The star of the evening was one of the restaurant’s signature dishes – frogs’ legs fried in butter and topped with black truffles.
This was the best meal of the trip. I really did not care that the acoustics of the room allowed me to listen to everyone’s conversation except my own, or that the toilet still had a gold tap in the shape of a swan. For nostalgia’s sake, my friends and I still took turns to go back to our rooms to drink Peterstaler sparkling water between courses. Not because we couldn’t afford the water though, we just never knew they served putrid Gerolsteiner by default.
As if dinner was not enough, we had breakfast in the hotel before our 800-mile drive back to England. Over the silkiest omelettes and sausages, I noticed on Instagram that Sat Bains (of Restaurant Sat Bains fame) was planning a similar trip, with additional stops at Troisgros and Da Vittorio in northern Italy. I wish him all the best.
Cover photo licensed by Adobe Stock. All other photos by J Khou.
September 2026
