Krone Hittisau

The Bregenzerwald Table: What Regional Cooking Looks Like at Its Most Honest

The village of Hittisau sits in the Bregenzerwald, a forested valley region in Vorarlberg that most visitors reach via Bregenz or across the German border from Lindau. The landscape is dairy country, with farmhouses producing the Sennkäse and Bergkäse that define the local food culture more than any chef's decision ever could. In that context, a restaurant like Krone Hittisau at Platz 185 is less a destination in the conventional sense and more a direct expression of where it sits. The stone-and-timber architecture of the surrounding village, the pastoral quiet, and the unhurried pace of a place where farming still shapes daily life all feed into what lands on the plate.

Regional Austrian cooking, particularly in the Alpine west, operates on a different logic than the modernist kitchens that have drawn international attention to places like Steirereck im Stadtpark in Vienna or Döllerer in Golling an der Salzach. Those restaurants treat Austrian ingredients as raw material for creative transformation. The Bregenzerwald tradition works differently: the ingredients are the argument, and cooking technique exists to clarify rather than reinterpret. Krone Hittisau belongs to that second tradition, and the Michelin Bib Gourmand it received in 2025 recognises exactly that, food of genuine quality at a price that reflects the region's practical, unsentimental relationship with hospitality.

The Bib Gourmand in an Alpine Context

Michelin's Bib Gourmand designation has specific meaning in the Austrian alpine corridor. It marks restaurants where the quality-to-price relationship is strong enough to warrant a detour, without the formality or cost of a starred experience. In Vorarlberg, that distinction matters more than it might in Vienna, because the dining infrastructure is thinner and the gap between good and mediocre is wider.

For comparison, the Vorarlberg and broader western Austria fine-dining circuit includes Griggeler Stuba in Lech and Gourmetrestaurant Tannenhof in Sankt Anton am Arlberg, both operating at higher price points and in the context of resort tourism. Krone Hittisau is something different: a village restaurant that has earned external recognition while remaining oriented toward the community it inhabits rather than the visitor economy that drives the ski towns.

What Bregenzerwald Regional Cuisine Actually Means

The Bregenzerwald has a food identity that predates contemporary notions of farm-to-table. Dairy is central. The region's cheese-making tradition, organised through a network of Alpine dairies called Sennereien, produces ingredients with a specificity of place that makes Vorarlberg's leading restaurants look very different from those in, say, Lower Austria or Styria. Dishes built around these cheeses, alongside game from the surrounding forests, freshwater fish from nearby rivers and the Bodensee, and root vegetables from valley farms, constitute the core of a regional cuisine that has its own internal logic.

This is a different kind of regional cooking from what you find at Kräuterreich by Vitus Winkler in Sankt Veit im Pongau, which uses alpine herbs as a conceptual framework, or the classic bourgeois Austrian approach at Landhaus Bacher in Mautern an der Donau. Vorarlberg's cooking has a distinctly western Austrian and historically Alemannic character, closer in spirit to Allgäu or Appenzell than to Vienna's culinary traditions. At Krone Hittisau, that cultural geography shows up in the cooking's restraint and in its refusal to dress up what the surrounding land already does well.

For further regional reference points within Austria's broader tradition, Obauer in Werfen and Ois in Neufelden offer useful counterpoints, kitchens that are equally rooted but draw from different regional pools. And internationally, Fahr in Künten-Sulz and Gannerhof in Innervillgraten demonstrate how the Alpine regional cuisine category plays out across borders.

Krone Within the Hittisau Dining Scene

Hittisau is a small village, and its restaurant scene reflects that. A handful of serious tables serve a mix of locals, walkers doing the Bregenzerwald trail network, and visitors who have made the effort to understand what Vorarlberg offers beyond its ski resorts. Krone Hittisau sits at the recognised end of that spectrum. Its closest local peers include Ernele and Wälder Stube 1840, the latter taking a contemporary approach to similar source material. Together, these three tables give Hittisau a dining identity that punches above what village-scale settlements typically sustain.

That kind of score in a rural setting is harder to maintain than in a city, where a restaurant can absorb variable nights with fresh traffic.

Planning a Visit

Hittisau is accessible by car from Bregenz in under an hour, or from Lindau across the German border in a similar window. The village has accommodation options for those planning an overnight stay, see our full Hittisau hotels guide for current options. Given the Bib Gourmand recognition and the limited scale of village dining, reservations are advisable, particularly on weekends and during the summer walking season and winter holiday periods when Vorarlberg draws visitors from across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

For those building a broader Vorarlberg itinerary, our full Hittisau restaurants guide covers the current scene, and our Hittisau bars guide, experiences guide, and wineries guide round out the picture for multi-day visits. The Bregenzerwald is the kind of region that rewards slow travel, and a meal at Krone Hittisau fits naturally into that pace.