Die Krone

Country Cooking at the Edge of the Black Forest

Staufen im Breisgau is a small medieval wine town in the Markgräflerland, tucked between the Upper Rhine Plain and the lower slopes of the southern Black Forest. The surrounding agricultural belt is one of Baden's most productive: market gardens in the Rhine floodplain, orchards climbing toward the forest edge, and established wine estates on the Tuniberg and Kaiserstuhl just to the north. In towns like this, the gap between field and plate is measured in kilometres rather than supply chains, and the restaurants that take that geography seriously tend to produce food with a precision that larger urban kitchens can only approximate.

Die Krone, at Hauptstraße 30, sits on the main street of the old town, within the kind of low-scale historic streetscape that signals Staufen's character before you've looked at a single menu. The building's position in the centre of town places it in easy walking distance from Staufen's wine bars and the surrounding market, making it a natural anchor for a day or evening spent in the area. It is a mid-range address by price, rated €€, which in this region means well-priced relative to the raw ingredient quality the location makes available.

What the Bib Gourmand Signals Here

The Michelin Bib Gourmand is awarded to restaurants offering food of notable quality at moderate prices, a category that sits below the star tier but operates on its own serious criteria. Die Krone has held the designation in both 2024 and 2025, meaning Michelin's inspectors have returned and confirmed the standard is consistent rather than a single good year. In a region where the starred tier includes addresses like Schwarzwaldstube in Baiersbronn operating at €€€€, and where the broader German fine dining circuit includes Aqua in Wolfsburg, JAN in Munich, and Vendôme in Bergisch Gladbach, the Bib Gourmand at Die Krone represents a different but equally credible point of entry into serious German cooking.

The distinction matters because country cooking at this level is not a lesser version of fine dining. It is a separate discipline, one that demands fluency in regional ingredients and technique in a register that resists the abstraction of contemporary tasting menus. The consistency that earns back-to-back Bib Gourmand recognition at a €€ address is, in practical terms, harder to maintain than it looks. Comparable country cooking traditions in neighbouring culinary regions, from Alsace across the Rhine to the Piedmontese hills of northwestern Italy, demonstrate how demanding the category becomes when ingredient sourcing is the primary medium of expression. See, for instance, 21.9 in Piobesi d'Alba or Andrea Monesi at Locanda di Orta in Orta San Giulio for a sense of how the rural restaurant idiom operates at its most serious in comparable European contexts.

The Sourcing Logic of the Markgräflerland

Country cooking, as a cuisine type, is inseparable from its geography. In the Markgräflerland specifically, that geography means proximity to some of Baden's most established agricultural infrastructure. The Rhine plain yields asparagus, soft fruit, and grain. The lower Black Forest slopes produce game, mushrooms, and dairy. The Kaiserstuhl and the local Staufen wine region provide the vinous context in which the food sits. A kitchen working in this tradition is essentially editing from abundance rather than sourcing against scarcity, and the editorial decisions, what to serve, how simply to treat it, when in the season to serve it, become the form of the cooking itself.

Chef Jimmy Shen leads the kitchen at Die Krone. In a culinary tradition where the chef's role is to surface the ingredient rather than to impose a signature on it, that restraint in approach is the point.

Within Staufen itself, Die Krone sits alongside other farm-to-table addresses including Ambiente and Höfli, which reflects the town's collective lean toward ingredient-led cooking. The concentration of this approach in a single small town is not coincidental: Staufen's position at the meeting point of agricultural plain and forested upland makes farm-to-table sourcing the default rather than the exception.

Placing Die Krone in the Broader German Restaurant Spectrum

Germany's restaurant culture is often read through its three-star addresses, a tier that includes the likes of ES:SENZ in Grassau, Restaurant Haerlin in Hamburg, Schanz in Piesport, and Victor's Fine Dining by Christian Bau in Perl. Innovative formats like CODA Dessert Dining in Berlin represent the creative edge of the domestic scene. Die Krone operates in a different register entirely, one defined by accessibility, regional rootedness, and the kind of honest execution that Michelin's Bib Gourmand category was specifically designed to recognise.

That positioning matters for how a visitor should approach it. This is not a destination restaurant in the pilgrim sense. It is a serious address in a town that rewards spending a full day, and the meal fits naturally into that rhythm: the wine estates, the old town, the surrounding walks, and then a dinner at a €€ address that holds two consecutive years of Michelin recognition. That combination of context and quality is precisely what makes the Markgräflerland worth building time around.

Planning a Visit

Die Krone is at Hauptstraße 30 in the centre of Staufen im Breisgau, reachable by train from Freiburg in under thirty minutes on the local Münstertalbahn line. Staufen is compact enough to walk entirely on foot once you arrive. The €€ price point means the meal represents strong value relative to the Michelin-recognised standard, and back-to-back Bib Gourmand years suggest booking ahead is sensible, particularly during asparagus season in spring and the autumn game season, when regional ingredient quality peaks and local demand increases accordingly.

For broader planning across the area, see our full Staufen im Breisgau restaurants guide, hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide.