Kräuterwirte in the Rheingau: regional cooking in one language
Published
The Kräuterwirte are an association of restaurateurs built around regional herb cookery. For a set of pictures that is an unusual brief: it has to show several houses and still hold together as one series.
Two parts came out of it, and they belong together — the individually plated dishes from the participating kitchens, and one shared picture of the hosts themselves.
The overhead view makes herbs readable
Most of the dishes are photographed straight down. For a kitchen whose signature is herbs, flowers and oils, that is the angle from which anything is actually visible.
From the side a herb oil disappears under the rim and a petal ends up behind the meat. From above every component lies clear, and the arrangement on the plate becomes the subject.
That holds for the restrained courses too: a plate with almost nothing on it is a composition from above and an empty field from the side.
Changing surfaces, constant light
Slate, wood, marble and dark stone alternate from course to course. Each surface gets the dish that suits it: pale marble under a dark sauce, dark stone under a pale purée.
What does not change is the lighting. A soft source from the side shows the height of the components without shading dark sauces into blackness — the same setup across the whole series.
That split is the core of the job: the surface provides variety, the light provides cohesion. If both varied, the series would fall apart into single pictures.
The group picture turns plates into an initiative
At the end stands a shared picture of the participating hosts: six people in matching pale green aprons, pots of herbs on a trolley between them, the wooden paneling of a dining room behind.
The matching aprons and the herbs in the middle are what carry the frame. Without them it would be six restaurateurs standing next to each other by chance; with them it is visible that they belong to one thing.
The location is deliberately one of the dining rooms and not a neutral backdrop. A regional initiative photographed against white card loses exactly the region it is about.
More courses from the series
What holds a shared series together
With an initiative made of several businesses the obvious solution is to photograph each one separately. The result is as many visual languages as there are houses, and a presence that looks like a collection.
Here it runs the other way: one light, one perspective, changing surfaces. The kitchens stay distinguishable, the presence stays single — and the group picture says outright at the end what the plates have been saying all along.
