Chef of the Month
Gerda Stocker
The herbal innkeeper
from the Bucklige Welt region
In a valley where time passes more slowly, there is an inn that speaks more quietly than others – but more deeply.
The Kräuterwirtin in Lembach is not a place for spectacle. It is a place of silence, of fragrance, of stories that plants tell when you listen to them.
Here, Gerda Stocker cooks, a woman who knows the rhythm of nature and translates it into her kitchen. Not as a trend, but as an attitude.
Whoever steps through the door smells the sorrel, the wood, the bread.
What thrives all around grows on the plates – wild mint, yarrow, chickweed, spruce sprouts.
Every plant has a voice here, every meal an origin.
Stocker is not only an innkeeper, she is a herbal educator, collector, preserver of knowledge that you cannot google.
Her kitchen is a school of mindfulness:
She shows that cooking is not about making something out of products, but about letting them become.
That perfection does not mean glamour, but respect for simplicity.
You can taste that in every soup that smells of meadow, and in every course that grounds more than impresses.
Perhaps that is exactly what connects Herbeus Greens with her:
the conviction that origin is not a place, but an attitude.
That every leaf – whether wildly collected or precisely cultivated – deserves dignity.
And that perfection begins where you trust nature.
Herb pâté and grilled fish on a stick.
by Gerda Stocker
Gerda Stocker is a hostess who does not seek the stage – she builds it: from wood, from herbs, from attitude.
She lets nature play and stands in the background, quiet and confident, like someone who knows:
If you allow the real thing, it will be strong enough to speak for itself.
That is the stage of perfection in the Bucklige Welt.
An inn that shows how great the small can be.
And how much power lies in a single leaf when you listen to it.
