An Interview with Christian Bau

MG: Do you write down your ideas on Paper?

CB: Rarely. When a dish is perfect, it’s formulated, but not as a dish. We recipe the individual components such as sauces, accompaniments or certain preparations.
These recipes are saved in the database.
It is then often the case that half a year later one picks up such a recipe and uses it for another dish.

A Purple Curry Sauce, for example, was originally conceived for a pigeon dish in spring, but it goes just as well with a venison dish in September. I recipe the blocks when the dish is perfect.

Of course, everyone works differently, I know colleagues who always have their book with them to note down their ideas at any time. I’m more intuitive, which, considering our success, can’t be all that wrong.

CB: I like to relax on the terrace with a glass of red wine and a cigar.

My big hobby is travelling, I want to see the world,
which works because my children are already grown up. Through my job I get to know many personalities, I get to cook for them. When you see a lot of the world, you also see a lot of the culinary world.

MG: What are your basic human needs?

CB: I don’t need luxury. I value good clothes, I don’t drive a big car, although Porsche, for example, has approached me.

MG: You are grounded…

CB: Yes, but my worldwide fame also makes things easy for me. I recently had a guest performance in Hong Kong, and one of the best hotels in the world got a whiff of it. They immediately sent a butler who organised a quick move from the current hotel to this absolute top house – under German management, by the way. In the middle of the night I moved into a suite twice as big as my home here on the Moselle.

For many things I have employees, without my personal assistant this could not function at all. But a Rolex for 25,000 € doesn’t make me a better person, and I don’t have to take a Porsche to the road after work and accelerate to 250 km/h to feel good.

Perhaps you could call this the “Harald Wohlfahrt Syndrome”.
Wohlfahrt is known to be a modest man. He has everything that can make life luxurious, but never showed it. He drove to work in his wife’s VW Golf, he exemplified modesty, we all learned from that. He was and is an icon of the genre.

You must not be jealous of people’s success, the question is how you deal with it. In my position, one is flattered, but I don’t demand it. I don’t really preach water and drink wine. I’m respected all over the world, but I’m still Christian Bau with the tennis shoes and jeans.