Region
A culinary microcontinent.
Franconia is a culinary microcontinent. Around Nuremberg, dry plateaus, fertile river valleys, warm vineyard slopes, sandy vegetable fields, old forests and thousands of ponds meet within the smallest of spaces. Each of these landscapes has brought forth its own produce, crafts and flavours. Together they form a region of extraordinary density — shaped by traditions that in places reach back almost a thousand years, and by people who carry them forward to this day.
From the Knoblauchsland to the Main.
There is the Knoblauchsland with its centuries-old market-gardening culture, and our own garden: Felix's realm, worked close to nature and in part along permaculture principles, full of rare varieties and plants almost no one else grows.
There are the traditional orchards, the hop landscapes and the Franconian brewing tradition. The forests with game and mushrooms, the mill valleys and the bread and grain culture born from them.
The Aischgrund with its old pond farming, its carp and new approaches such as regional sturgeon breeding. And the Main with its vineyards, young winemakers and a warming climate in which peaches and kiwis now have a future too.
What grows at our door.
„We would dearly wish for more restaurateurs to explore the boundless richness of our regional flora and fauna — and to celebrate it as sustainably as we do at etz.“
Gault & Millau · 4 Black Toques 2025
Ambassadors of this landscape.
We see ourselves as ambassadors of this landscape. We want to preserve what makes it unique — and at the same time show what culinary potential still lies within it. To do so, we work with farmers, gardeners, fish breeders, hunters, butchers, millers, bakers, winemakers and research institutes.
Many of them don't simply keep a tradition alive. They search for new varieties, new forms of agriculture and new answers to a landscape already being changed by the climate.
Meeting the people and animals.
Rooted, not bound.
Everything we find in this region becomes the foundation of our cooking. In our test kitchen we refine it through fermentation, ageing, drying, extraction and concentration. These techniques are not meant to distort the landscape but to make its flavours more precise and more intense. This is how a new cuisine from Franconia takes shape: rooted in an old cultural landscape, yet not bound to its past.
Seven seasons.
For anyone truly devoted to seasonality, four seasons simply aren't enough.