Third floor of a former warehouse out past HafenCity. Thomas Imbusch cooks on a single stove standing open in the middle of the room, and the restaurant is named after two temperatures.
The address is a warehouse and that matters
Brandshofer Deich 68, on the third floor of a former warehouse in a listed brick ensemble of 1926, out past HafenCity. You do not arrive at this restaurant by accident and there is nothing around it to make an evening of. That is the correct order of things here: the room is the destination and the city is the journey to it.
One stove, with his name on it
Thomas Imbusch cooks on a single Molteni stove with his own name cast into it, 8777 Imbusch, standing open on all sides in the middle of the room. A kitchen arranged this way is a constraint chosen on purpose. Everything that goes out has come off one piece of equipment that everybody in the room can see, which removes most of the places a restaurant can hide and concentrates the cooking into a single continuous performance that is not being performed at you.
The name is the method
The house explains it in one line: water boils at a hundred, two hundred is a good number in the oven, and the complexity lies in the simplicity. That is the whole thesis and it is refreshingly free of mysticism. Two temperatures, one stove, and the difficulty deliberately relocated from the equipment to the judgement.
Declared seasons, published ahead
This is the detail that sets the house apart from almost every other kitchen at this level, and it is the reason we can write about it with more confidence than about anywhere else in this issue. 100/200 works in declared seasons and publishes them in advance. Water and Salt ran to 19 July. The vegetarian season runs from 31 July to 25 October. A restaurant that tells you months ahead which days it works, and what it will be cooking on them, has solved the single most tiresome problem in planning a trip around a table. One menu of the year is built around the slaughter of their own cattle, and they say so in writing, which almost nobody at this level does.
How to reach them, and what we have not claimed
They publish no telephone number at all, only reservierung@100200.kitchen and an Exploretock booking system, both read on the day of writing. So this is an email rather than a call, which suits the house. Their own site carries Michelin claims for this restaurant and for its sister house. We have printed no star for either, on the same rule that applies to every venue in this issue: Michelin's own pages could not be opened to check.
At a glance
The TGC view
A house that publishes its own calendar months ahead is the easiest table in this letter to build a trip around, and the hardest to be disappointed by, because it has already told you what it will be doing on the day you arrive. We book it for a guest who wants one genuinely serious dinner in Hamburg and does not need the restaurant to also be an address.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗Marco Müller cooking in Mitte, thirteen inspirations or twelve, and a house that tells you how long the evening is by refusing to seat you after half past seven.
Read the review →A kaiseki house that tells you what dinner costs before you ask, which at this level is rarer than it should be. What its English page does not tell you is that the number changes on the first of October, in the months it also tells you to book early for.
Read the review →Zaiyu Hasegawa cooks one menu in an architects' association building in Jingumae and publishes no price for it. There is no booking form. You telephone, between noon and five, and that is the only door.
Read the review →