Rating: 17/20
Where: Hamburg, Germany
When: Dinner for 3 on 29 June 2024
Cost per Person: Tasting menu 295 Euro, Wine pairing 195 Euro
Accolades: 2 Michelin Stars
Why: Delicious seafood dishes, almost clairvoyant service

The restaurant Haerlin is a fixture of Hamburg's fine-dining scene. It is located in the city's “Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten”, and named after the hotel's founder. (Even though the hotel's name translates to "Four Seasons", it is not related to the international hotel chain.) Under long-time chef Christoph Rüffer, the restaurant has held two Michelin stars since 2012, and is perennially mentioned as a contender for that rare third star.

The Vier Jahreszeiten's decor is definitely old-school, more at home in the early 20th century than the 21st century. The restaurant's interior was a touch more modern, but still in a style that my grandmother would have approved of. A nice view of the Binneralster lake was visible through the street-facing windows. But what set the tone for the restaurant was neither the decor nor the white table cloths; instead it was the friendly and unfussy service that always seemed to magically intuit what one was about to ask next. Our interactions with the servers were effortless to a degree that’s rarely seen even at many three-starred restaurants.

Haerlin offered a single six-course tasting menu. However, the menu was customizable: four additional courses were listed, and they could be substituted for any of the original ones, or even added to the menu. The latter option might not necessarily be advisable since regular set of dishes was already pretty substantial. I liked this approach - if one wasn't particularly fond of one of the ingredients (in my case, the quail), then avoiding it was effortless. No need to have an awkward conversation with one's server that made one feel like a high-maintenance customer. Eat what you like, not what the kitchen decided for you, while still following the main beats of the tasting menu. In our case, we tried all optional courses except for the cheese course, and yes, ended up trading away all of our quails. A wine pairing was available as well, with pretty good wines, only its price of 195 Euro seemed a bit on the high side. In any case, it was worth ordering an aperitif since the pairing started only with the first main course.

This was my second visit to Haerlin in two months. On my first visit, I was too busy to take any notes. But I had a great time and found the food to be quite tasty, so I figured it was worth coming back for a closer look - this time with a notebook on hand.

Our dinner started with several amuse bouches and a bread service. First, there was a round of three different bites. A potato-filled gougere was topped with a nut butter, horseradish and caviar. It tasted less like a traditional gougere and more like a potato pancake. The horseradish added a nice bit of spiciness 17. A sorbet made from salad leaves came with red cabbage and a clarified gazpacho. This was also a nice dish, with some crunch from the cabbage and acidity from the gazpacho. However, the sorbet was a bit too sweet for my taste 16. Finally, an oyster that had been poached in champagne and was served with cucumbers and dill. This dish was also a bit sweet, but otherwise quite good 16.

The bread service offered at Haerlin was extensive. We received four different kinds of bread: a fougasse, a baguette, a Parmesan pretzel roll and a gluten-free almond-chestnut bread. All were pretty good, except for the slightly dry almond bread. When it came to bread toppings, there also many choices. An olive oil seasoned with lovage, an onion-sauerkraut cream cheese, and a butter that was blended table-side either with herbs or with lemons. The cream cheese was delicious, and I preferred the aromatic herb butter over the slightly sweet lemon butter 17.

The final amouse bouche was a beef tartare that was topped with a soy-glazed eel and an egg mayonnaise and surrounded by an eel bouillon. The eel was lovely, and the taste of the dish was dominated by lots of umami, from the soy sauce and the bouillon. The beef tartare ended up adding more texture than taste to this dish, which overall felt a bit heavy and autumnal 16.

On to the main courses. A lobster tail came with a crustacean vinaigrette, two kinds of melons, a crustacean jelly, an avocado-jalapeño mousse, a tomato vanilla jus and a cannelloni filled with shellfish. The tender lobster and cannelloni were pretty good, and the jalapeño mousse was spicier than I had expected. But there was a lot going on in this dish, making it hard to focus on any single component 17.

One of the optional dishes was a mackerel that came with a sorrel sorbet, pickled cucumbers and radishes, a fennel jus and lime. The fish tasted just the right amount of fishy - noticeable but not too much. The fattiness of the fish was offset by some nice crunch and acidity from the pickles. A light but flavorful dish 18.

A red mullet filet arrived with a chorizo sauce, a paprika sabayon, and an artichoke salad topped with polenta. This course also had a lot going on. The fish was good, but mostly served as a foil for the other components of the dish. The sabayon was amazing - it was practically bursting with flavor. Surprisingly, the sauce didn't really taste of chorizo, it felt more closely related to a bouillabaisse - but no complaints here, it went great with the fish. The artichokes added some welcome acidity, only the polenta was a bit generic compared to everything else on the plate. A very nice dish overall 18.

Yet another fish dish followed: turbot was served with broccoli and a few slices of octopus. There were two sauces on the plate: one based on octopus, the other based on peas and including a pea mousse. The fish was nicely cooked with a semi-firm texture, and I was blown away by the octopus sauce - it was lovely, with just the right amount of acidity. I wasn't as impressed by the pea sauce, it didn't taste much of peas to me - but my dining companions disagreed and found it to have a strong pea flavor, so go figure... Good then that there were two sauces, offering something for everyone 18.

The final savory course of the tasting menu was supposed to be a quail, but we saved the lives of three quails by ordering two of the optional courses instead. One of us had tortelli filled with burrata. They came with white asparagus and smoked culatello (a distant relative to prosciutto). The culatello had the strongest taste of anything on the plate, but the al dente pasta was very nice as well 17.

The rest of us ordered the lamb dish. An herb-crusted bone-in saddle of lamb came with some kampot pepper, a zucchini puree, chanterelles, and red wine poached onions. The lamb was tender and flavorful, and the pepper and herb topping added some complexity, but the crumbly texture of the topping felt a bit “simple”. I also wasn't a big fan of either the zucchini puree or the onions - they weren't really needed for this dish, the lamb could have stood on its own. On the side was a small sauce pan containing braised lamb shoulder and an herb hollandaise. This second preparation of lamb was also tender, and didn't fall apart as stewed meat often does - very nicely done. The herb hollandaise was amazing - so full of flavor that I would happily have eaten the sauce just by itself 17.

The first dessert was a “spaghetti ice cream”, a classic in German ice cream shops that is usually prepared using vanilla ice cream shaped like spaghetti strands topped with strawberry puree (resembling tomato sauce) and shaved white chocolate (resembling cheese). A dish that hasn't really caught on in the rest of the world for some reason... Haerlin's version used Tahitian vanilla ice cream, frozen Chantilly cream, glazed forest berries, roasted hazelnuts and an unsweetened and clarified strawberry essence that was added to the dish tableside. The result was quite tasty, with the hazelnuts being a welcome crunchy addition to the “regular” ingredients 18.

Dessert number two was a variation on berries. Giant “fake” blueberries were filled with blueberry yogurt ice cream, and came with rose leaves, a rose jus, yogurt cream and spruce cream pearls. On the side was a bowl filled with blueberry soup, pickled blueberries, rose foam and curd dumplings. Overall, this was a pleasant dessert. I'm usually not a big fan of rose flavor, but its use here was restrained enough to not be grating. The creamy blueberry yogurt was lovely, and while the blueberry soup seemed quite sweet at first, the acidity of the pickled blueberries balanced that pretty well. Finally, the dumplings provided some non-fruit texture 17.

Several petit fours concluded our dinner after almost five hours. The canneles were just ok, they had not much vanilla flavor, were too doughy and not very crunchy 16. Macaroons were flavored with raspberry and Marc de Champagne. They were crunchy but the raspberry flavor was very light 15. An orange/tarragon delice had just hints of orange 15. A chocolate “taco” filled with macadamia nuts and bergamot was nice enough 16. Two chocolate pralines were offered as well. One was filled with shiso and mezcal, and tasted mostly of white chocolate with a hint of alcohol 15. The other praline, filled with yuzu and “vanilla noire”, had a nice vanilla taste 16. The best petit four was a lemon sorbet that was topped with white chocolate foam and sat atop of a hazelnut crunch 17.

Looking back at the tasting menu, there were only a couple things to nitpick. First, several courses felt a bit busy, with too many different components on the plate (or even multiple plates), making it unclear what a particular dish was really “about”. And, relatedly, there was no obvious “story” behind the tasting menu. Pretty much everything was tasty, but there was no theme that connected the dishes. Had there been a common theme, the multiple components might have made more sense.

Overall: This was a wonderful dinner, with a series of delicious dishes and an exceptionally good, relaxed service. I loved the ability to customize the menu while still keeping the majority of the tasting menu in place. Some small meta-nitpicks nonwithstanding, a place that I'd happily return to whenever in town 17.