What We Did Last Saturday

In my previous post, I mentioned that the Saturday of that week deserved its own post. Here it is!

For our wedding, among other gifts my Mum and my sister had given us a voucher for a famous and popular restaurant in Stuttgart. It was founded in 1991 by chef Vincent Klink and received a Michelin star for the first time in 1998. Mr Klink is well known in Germany, especially in our area, as he's been on cooking shows on TV for many years. My parents loved his show and often watched it together, but somehow a visit to the restaurant never came about.

Now that my husband and I had been presented with the voucher we only needed to find a date and time for our visit... of course that's easier said than done! It took several emails back and forth, because the relatively small restaurant is almost always fully booked (Wielandshöhe, the website is only available in German but has photos of the place).

Contrary to our usual meal times, we booked a table for lunch last Saturday (24 October), as evenings are even more popular. It turned out to be a good idea, because it meant we still had plenty of daylight left for a walk afterwards.

Having skipped breakfast, we took two local trains plus a funicular to Wielandshöhe in Stuttgart, a journey of about an hour. I'd last been in this area in April 2025, and after our meal we walked part of the tour my sister and I had done back then with some of her colleagues. Click here for the post from 2025 and scroll down until you reach Sunday, if you want to see the pictures from then.

We had been asked not to turn up before 12:00, and since we had a few minutes to spare, we walked up from the funicular stop to catch some views of Stuttgart. It began to drizzle just as we were on our way back to the restaurant.

View from Wielandshöhe towards Fernsehturm ("TV Tower"), a famous Stuttgart landmark

Mr Klink's daughter, Eva Klink, manages the restaurant. She stood at the entry, checked our reservation and lead us to a table by a window to the terrace. My husband gallantly offered me the seat with the best view. Hot wet towels were brought to our table so that we could wipe our hands - a small but very effective gesture, adding to our comfort and making us feel welcome.

The meal was very good, the food and wines as excellent as the service. There was plenty of staff, and at one point Mr Klink walked in from the kitchen, stopped at every table and exchanged a few words with the guests. His daughter made the rounds at the tables several times, and although she was friendly with us, we overheard a conversation with guests at a nearby table where she reacted very brusquely when they politely asked where the mushrooms had been picked.

We enjoyed every one of the three courses (plus "Greeting from the Kitchen", plus an unexpected selection of mini desserts served with our espressos) and knew we weren't going to need a full meal that evening!

The sun had been out on and off and there had been the odd sprinkle of rain while we dined. When we eventually left the restaurant at about 3:00 pm, it was dry, windy and sunny, and we started on our walk, consulting the leaflet I had picked up on the way. The exact starting point was a bit hard to find, as the map wasn't very detailed and I couldn't remember at first where we'd started 1 1/2 years ago (I was part of a group then and not responsible for finding the way, and therefore didn't pay all that much attention).

Good part of the way was in the woods, then past one cemetery and across another before we reached the historic cable car that took us down into the valley of Stuttgart again.

The cable car travels on top of this bridge to cross a busy road.

From there, we took a tram into the city centre and walked along the Königstraße ("King's Road"), Stuttgart's largest pedestrian area. It had seemed a good idea, but we were soon fed up with the throngs of people, similar to my recent experience in Munich. Anyway, we caught a local train back to Ludwigsburg, where I made use of the remaining daylight and dry weather to clean my neighbours' rabbit hutch and the outside enclosure.

A cosy evening followed with only a plate of light snacks for each of us later on while watching a film.

Not the sun, but the moon as seen from my kitchen window at 20 to 7 that evening.

Eating at the Wielandshöhe certainly was a unique and overall pleasant experience, and when we were at my Mum's for coffee & cake the next day, of course we told her and my sister all about it - after all, it had been one of their wedding presents for us. Thank you, Mum and Sis!