F*CK CAVIAR AND LONG LIVE SHROOMS
Berlin has never felt like a natural home for fine dining. Some its iconic restaurants are closing, with the owners saying that business is tough.
It’s a city that moves to its own rhythm — one where street food often outshines white tablecloths, where a 6 euro, late-night döner can feel more authentic than a 60 euro tasting menu, and where neighbourhoods like Kreuzberg carry a kind of restless, anarchic energy that doesn’t immediately invite formality. Over the years, that energy has shifted. In parts, it feels rougher, less polished, worn at the edges.
We came here on invitation, ahead of their upcoming residency at Salt in Budapest (April 14-19), curious to understand what exactly they would bring with them.
A Change in Direction
Chef Sebastian Frank did not begin with vegetables.
His early career followed the classic fine dining trajectory — kitchens defined by luxury ingredients, precision, and a certain expectation of what “serious” cooking should look like. He started where a chef’s ambition usually begins — caviar, langoustine, wagyu, the definition of a serious kitchen.
But somewhere along the way, about a decade ago, he began to move in a different direction. Not abruptly, but gradually. Slowly, the menu shifted to fewer proteins and more vegetables. Eventually, almost entirely vegetables.
Part philosophy, part necessity deemed this change inevitable. As he explained, sourcing consistently high-quality local produce around Berlin is a challenge. Instead of forcing luxury into the kitchen, he built a cuisine around constraint — and then pushed that constraint until it became something far more interesting than the abundance of top produce.
The meal begins with an onion broth.
At first, it feels simple. Clear, restrained, almost minimalistic. But then the details begin to reveal themselves — lovage bringing a green, slightly nostalgic warmth, celeriac seed adding depth and spice.
Frank describes it as an evocation of the Neusiedlersee, where he grew up. And that makes sense. The dish feels grounded, rooted, connected to place in a way that doesn’t need explanation. It’s his memories, translated into flavour.
Familiar, Yet Not
Mushrooms appear early, and from the beginning, they carry a certain weight in the menu.
A mushroom stew, inspired by the texture and richness of kidney dishes, arrives semi-dried, deeply savoury, paired with caraway emulsion, horseradish cream, and apples from Frank’s garden.
There is something immediately recognisable about it. The flavours echo dishes from Central and Eastern Europe — the kind you might find in a Hungarian csárda or an Austrian kitchen. For me it’s a love letter to a kind of “pörkölt”, where the onions and paprika dissolve down into a concentrated hearty sauce you can mop up with some white bread.
And yet, everything is slightly more precise, more layered. The richness is there, but so is the acidity. The comfort is there, but it never becomes heavy.
Constant Balance
What becomes clear, dish by dish, is Frank’s obsession with balance — not in the symmetrical sense, but in something closer to tension between parts.
Throughout the meal, there is a rhythm that develops — a movement between depth and brightness, richness and sharpness.
A dish of radicchio braised in Cabernet Franc from Christian Tschida, paired with fresh chicory and hazelnut cream, captures this perfectly. Bitter, sweet, nutty, and fresh all at once.
Nothing dominates. Everything is held in tension. It’s a dish that keeps your palate permanently alert — like a conversation where no one quite agrees, but everyone’s interesting.
A side note on the drinks and wine pairing. Tschida is perhaps the most well known organic, biodynamic, natural wine maker from Austria and the wine list contains some rather interesting varietals from Slovenia, Hungary, Austria and neighboring countries all produced devoid of any “manipulation”.
I forget to tell the delightful sommelier my aversion to some of these wines, because this flows naturally into the story of Horváth, blends well with the dishes and is consistent in terms of philosophy. Who am I to question the dedication behind this?
A Moment of Simplicity
Then comes bread — a rice sourdough, served with salted butter. And alongside it, unexpectedly, a bowl of mashed potatoes. You could argue it’s unnecessary. You’d be wrong.
It’s a small detail, but it changes something. The potatoes, enriched with clarified brown butter and roasted potato peel, feel completely unforced.
For a moment, the complexity of the menu fades into the background, and what remains is something very simple: warmth, familiarity, a sense of being taken somewhere remembered rather than somewhere new.
Transformation
One of the most striking dishes is a mushroom interpretation of foie gras in the form of a bonbon. Design-wise it is a masterpiece, resembling more of a luxury Swiss chocolate than anything vegetable-based.
The mushrooms are blended with butter, reduced until concentrated, then balanced with Styrian balsamic. The result is rich, smooth, deeply satisfying: a silky, decadent, almost indecently rich bonbon that behaves exactly like liver — minus the liver.
Served with soft and spongy Austrian brioche and apricot kernel oil butter, it carries the indulgence of foie gras — but without imitation.
It doesn’t try to replace anything. It simply exists on its own terms.
A Statement
Then comes the dish that perhaps defines the philosophy most clearly: “Fuck Caviar.”
Served in a tin, mushroom pearls mimic caviar, resting on Jerusalem artichoke cream with sea fennel. Alongside it, a small molded finger filled with balsamic vinegar.
The gesture is playful, slightly provocative, but not aggressive. It feels less like rejection and more like quiet confidence — a statement that flavour and experience don’t need to rely on traditional hallmarks of luxury.
It is more of a marketing ploy, than a full fledged and well thought out dish, and there are quite a few things happening in the tin – perhaps one too many. But in this day and age of instant gratification, short and sweet messages on social media that are easy to interpret, don’t require decoding, encompass the ethos of the menu in two words: Fuck Caviar is as short and sweet as it gets.
Reset
After a sequence of rich, layered dishes, a plate simply called “Pickles” arrives. Pickles are commonplace in Austro-Hungarian dishes and cuisine and serve to balance and counterpoint rich, fried food and thick stews. Here, it arrives based on its own merits: not as an accompaniment, but as the main protagonist.
It is one of the most visually striking moments of the meal — smoked onions, savoy cabbage, potato sauce, and a collection of pickled vegetables arranged around a central sorbet of celery and fennel. It’s one of the most beautiful plates I’ve seen — not just visually, but structurally.
The flavours are clean, bright, refreshing.
A reset. A cleansing. A reminder that acidity is not a side note — it’s a backbone.
Obsession with an Ingredient
Then comes the celeriac dish.
Layer upon layer: steamed, creamed, puréed, and finished with aged celeriac shaved over the top. The aged celeriac is hard as a rock and looks like a mummified, petrified fossil. I forget to listen to the story behind it as I marvel at the idea.
As a contrast to the celeriac-rock, the beautiful crunchy ribbons of celeriac are artistically folded onto the plate like an art deco curtain, waiting to be showered by the dried celeriac rain. Underneath celeriac pureé creates a soft bedding for it all.
It’s a study in depth — how far a single ingredient can be pushed, how many dimensions it can reveal when given time and attention.
What might otherwise be overlooked becomes the centre of the experience.
Comfort, Revisited
The “main” dish arrives in true Central European spirit: fried.
A portobello mushroom, steamed in almond oil, then breaded and fried sits alongside a deconstructed potato salad — vinegary, bright, with leek mayonnaise and fried parsley.
Again, there is something unmistakably familiar. The flavours recall meals from childhood, from mountain hüttes, from simple kitchens — but here they are reassembled with precision and intent.
At the end of the day it is a deep fried, breaded dish with a potato salad that is the cornerstone of every Austrian diet, although this is fairly distant from a pedestrian Schnitzel.
A Character, More than a Dessert
Dessert is presented as Marianne, a character from Ödön von Horváth, a famous Austrian writer, whose name the restaurant carries.
In the book, she represents independence, a desire to move beyond expectations. Exactly what Sebastian Frank is trying to do in the kitchen.
His dish reflects this: white chocolate, parsley root cream, and a sauce built on cherry blossom vinegar, lemon, and vanilla.
Once again, richness is balanced by acidity. The structure remains consistent, even as the flavours shift.
One Last Surprise
At the end, a small detail.
A petit four — red, earthy, familiar in taste.
We identify it as beetroot, but we are wrong.
It’s a pork blood praliné.
After a menu built almost entirely on vegetables, the gesture feels less like contradiction and more like freedom — a constant reminder that the rules here are not fixed and independence from norms is the basis of it all.
What Stays With You
What Horváth does, ultimately, is difficult to describe in simple terms.
There is complexity — layers of technique, fermentation, aging, and reference. But what remains most clearly is something else: a sense of comfort.
Not in the traditional sense, but in something deeper — food that feels connected, grounded, familiar, even when it is new.
That is where the strength of the restaurant lies.
And that is why, when they arrive in Budapest between April 14-19 to the premises of Salt restaurant, it will be worth sitting down and experiencing it.
