Roter Hahn

Rating: 16
Author: Gault&Millau

Rote-Hahnen-Gasse 10, 93047 Regensburg, Germany

16/20
Remarkable Restaurant

BOOK

1 PHOTOS

Chef: Maximilian Schmidt
Cooking: European | French | German | Local | Vegan | Vegetarian
Services: Access for people with disabilities | Accommodation | Private Parking | Private Room | Terrace
Style: Casual | Exceptional setting | With friends

Gault&Millau's review 2025

"Hi, I'm Lukas and I'd like to introduce you to the team" – if you don't like such a chummy greeting, you might not want to dine at the "Roter Hahn" in Regensburg. But what might seem artificial elsewhere is part of the concept here, including a slightly dim rock café atmosphere with retro fans on the ceiling and analogue record player, which "the team" regularly has to equip with new vinyl discs. In contrast to the cool ambience, you could call the kitchen of the only thirty-year-old Maximilian Schmidt, although the descendant of an old Regensburg restaurateur's family learned his trade from Anton Schmaus virtually next door. Overly bright Asian flavours like in the "Storstad" are not his thing, which was exemplified by a salmon trout sashimi with subtly sour strawberry sauce, a distinctive combination. It was gratifying that there were two offal on the menu during our visit. Once in the form of a butter-tender beef tongue, cooked in a vacuum and once again aromatically accentuated on the charcoal grill, with crunchy chanterelles on top and an unforgettable sauce Vierge, another time as sweetbreads, also cooked sous-vide and then fried again with not too hot pepper jus. Only menus of three to eight courses (lunch three or four courses) are served, which can be supplemented with "signatures". We would have liked to have deselected the dessert, which once again proved that corn, apart from polenta, has no place in haute cuisine: Both corn parfait and corn cream tasted only sweet and even the pickled mountain peaches could not remedy the taste nihilism of the yellow grains. The ambitious wine list, casually presented by sommelier Lukas Eigelt, has a lot of little-known things in store, including from the natural wine scene. As an aperitif, we liked a magnificent sparkling wine from the Nyetimber winery, founded in 1988, one of the pacesetters of the sparkling wine revolution in the south of the United Kingdom.