Helmut Thieltges
German chef who earned three Michelin stars at Waldhotel Sonnora.
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via Wikipedia: Helmut Thieltges · see source
Helmut Thieltges (24 September 1955 – 26 July 2017) was a German chef. From 1978, he was the chef at the Waldhotel Sonnora, his own family business in a forest on the edge of Dreis.
Beginning in 1999, his restaurant was awarded three stars by the Michelin Guide for eighteen consecutive years. He also earned 19.5/20 points in Gault Millau in 2015 and was named Gault Millau's "Chef of the Year" in 1998. Thieltges gave few interviews, never published a cookbook, and only wanted to concentrate on his work, delighting guests from Belgium, Luxembourg, and France with his precise classical cuisine.
Background
Thieltges was the only child of innkeepers Vinzenz and Maria Thieltges, who ran the Pension Elisabeth in Dreis. After his apprenticeship at the Roman Emperor in Trier, he moved to the Schlosshotel Pontresina near St. Moritz in 1973, then to the Breidenbacher Hof in Düsseldorf, and in 1977 to the Bastei restaurant in Cologne. Since 1978, he cooked at the family-owned Waldhotel Sonnora.
He started with a normal dining restaurant program, but his cuisine later earned praise for its "standards of precision." Of his cooking he once said, "Classical is the true art. That is the basis of everything. Modern can call anyone who wants to do something else with violence." Thieltges died after a brief illness at age 61.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Helmut Thieltges (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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