For many chefs, their kitchen feels like home. So what happens if you take a chef out of their element – and put them in someone else’s? Sebastian Frank, chef of Horváth in Berlin, and Szilárd Tóth, chef of Salt in Budapest, will find out when they swap restaurants in April. Even hundreds of kilometres apart, the ideas behind the two places are strikingly similar: a rejection of luxury ingredients for their own sake and a return to something closer to home.
The Chef from Austria in Berlin
Horváth sits on Paul-Lincke-Ufer, where it’s lived several lives. In the 1970s, it was Exile, a legendary restaurant where musicians, philosophers and writers gathered; it was a local haunt of David Bowie, too. Later, it became a modest neighbourhood bistro. But that all changed in 2010, when Sebastian Frank arrived from Vienna. With a complete redesign and a radically new approach to the kitchen, he transformed the quiet café into one of Berlin’s most exciting fine-dining destinations.
Within a year, Horváth received a Michelin star, making Sebastian one of the youngest chefs in Berlin to achieve the honour. A second star followed soon after. In 2015, Sebastian and his wife Jeannine took over the restaurant entirely. But even as it rose through the ranks of haute cuisine, Sebastian was already questioning the rules of the game. By the mid-2010s, he began reducing meat and fish on the menu and gradually removed ingredients that had to be imported from far away. Long supply chains were unpredictable and quality varied. More importantly, he felt there was little creative challenge left in cooking with expensive ingredients. By 2019, he made a radical decision: meat disappeared entirely from the menu. Vegetables became the centrepiece of Horváth’s cuisine – and the guests kept on coming. Then the pandemic arrived.
The Chef from Szatmár in Budapest
Around the same time in Budapest, another chef was rethinking the future of fine dining. When Covid struck, Szilárd Tóth turned his restaurant – open for barely six months – into a deli operation, delivering homemade bread, butter and smoked goods to customers. He’d opened Salt in 2019 with his partner Máté Boldzsár, bringing a new idea to Budapest’s more traditional fine-dining scene. The restaurant offered something unusual: an informal atmosphere, dishes partly prepared in front of guests and the option of non-alcoholic drink pairings instead of wine. But the real novelty lay in the inspiration behind the menu. Rather than luxury ingredients, Szilárd looked to the traditional cuisine of Szatmár, one of Hungary’s poorest regions.
The approach paid off. Salt earned a Michelin star in 2021 and a Michelin Green Star in 2022. Szilárd explained their vision: “Fine dining isn’t expensive because we put caviar on everything. It’s expensive because eight people work to bring out the flavour of a single carrot in a way guests have never tasted before. A bluefin tuna can impress almost anyone. A carrot, on the other hand, has to work much harder. Turning something so humble into something extraordinary – that’s where true culinary mastery begins.”
At Horváth, the same philosophy has become something of a motto: ‘fuck caviar’. After all, a truly great chef should be able to create fine dining from the vegetables sold at the Maybachufer market.
Time to Sober Up
By the middle of the last decade, the golden age of haute cuisine – defined by lobster, champagne and excess – was already beginning to fade. In Scandinavia, a paradigm shift was underway at restaurants like Noma, but it would take a few more years, and a few more shocks, for that change to fully register in cities like Budapest and Berlin.
A bluefin tuna can impress anyone. A carrot, on the other hand, has to work much harder
The hedonistic decade had left diners and chefs alike with a slight hangover. Then came Covid, shaking faith in long, fragile supply chains and forcing a broader reckoning. Many began to question just how sustainable their previous lifestyles, and the culinary worlds built around them, had really been.
When Salt opened, it embodied this new sensibility. The focus was not on luxury ingredients but on technique, narrative and a sense of place. After Horváth entered a new chapter, its chef, Sebastian, increasingly moved in the same direction.
Across the world of haute cuisine, similar transformations were taking place. Some restaurants turned dinner into elaborate, immersive performances; others began telling intricate stories through their menus. Szilárd and Sebastian, however, chose a different path. Rather than chasing spectacle, they turned inward, toward the landscapes and traditions that had shaped them: their roots.
“Le radici sono importanti”
In one scene of Paolo Sorrentino’s film La Grande Bellezza, an elderly nun is asked why she eats beetroot. Her answer is simple: “Le radici sono importanti.” Roots matter.
It’s a sentiment that resonates deeply at Horváth. One of the restaurant’s most iconic dishes begins with an ingredient that could hardly be more humble: celery. The vegetable is sealed in salted dough and left to dry for twelve months, transforming the rock-hard €1 staple into something astonishingly intense in flavour. For chef Sebastian, celery is more than a clever culinary exercise – it’s personal. In Lower Austria, where he grew up, celery is one of the region’s most beloved seasonings. Horváth may not be an ‘Austrian’ restaurant in any conventional sense, but Sebastian eventually realised that the ingredients he knew best were the ones from which he could create something truly distinctive.
A similar philosophy guided Szilárd when he opened Salt. From the beginning, the restaurant has drawn inspiration from the cooking of the Szatmár region in eastern Hungary. Meat does appear on the menu – smoked goods, for instance, come from the adobe smokehouse run by Szilárd and his brother-in-law, where it is prepared using centuries-old techniques – but it rarely takes centre stage. Fish, vegetables and foraged ingredients play equally important roles, while vegetarian and vegan dishes sit comfortably alongside the rest of the menu. When animal products are used, they come from carefully sourced, ethical producers.
Central and Eastern Europe offers a natural advantage to chefs working in this direction. Techniques that have recently become fashionable in haute cuisine – fermentation, pickling, foraging – have long been everyday practices here. Because urbanisation came relatively late and many rural traditions persisted well into the 20th century, these methods were still part of daily life only a few decades ago. For chefs like Sebastian and Szilárd, rediscovering them is not an act of reinvention but of remembering.
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship
Berlin’s restaurant scene hasn’t been immune to the economic slowdown that began in 2023. At Horváth, too, guest numbers have dipped, prompting the team to look for new ways to bring diners through the door. The restaurant once again turned to its roots. Horváth’s wine list already focusses almost exclusively on producers from Central and Eastern Europe, so the team had connections across the region. It felt natural to reach out to restaurants whose philosophy aligned with their own.
That’s how the collaboration with Salt began. The Budapest team first travelled to Berlin in 2024. A year later, Horváth returned the visit. What started as a four-hands dinner quickly turned into something more. The partnership proved so successful that the chefs have now taken the idea a step further: for a few days, they’re swapping restaurants. From April 15 to 19, diners in Berlin will be able to experience Salt’s Central and Eastern European take on fine dining at Horváth, while at the very same time, Horváth will be in Budapest, showing what modern, sustainable haute cuisine looks like from the perspective of Kreuzberg.
You can follow Salt @salt_budapest and Horváth @restauranthorvathberlin
