About the restaurant:
This restaurant appears shrouded in mystery, with very little information on its website. No sample menu, no pictures of the food, and no information about the restaurant and its operation. There’s not even any indication that it’s vegan. But this is intentional.
Head Chef Ricky Saward believes that the magic of food comes from being surprised, and once you’ve seen the menu and imagined the taste, the magic is gone. So, if you want to get the true Seven Swans experience, skip to the next restaurant in this list now.
Seven Swans serves farm-to-table dishes crafted from ingredients grown no more than 50 km from the restaurant. In fact, many of them come from the restaurant’s own permaculture garden, Braumannswiesen (or, Brewer’s Meadows), just outside of Frankfurt. This is one reason Seven Swans has also been awarded a green star for sustainability.
Dining here is an experience, as each part of the seven-course ‘surprise menu’ is served to all guests in the dining room at the same time, along with a detailed, impassioned description of the dish by the head chef himself.
The decor is stripped-back and minimalistic, and the seating isn’t exactly comfortable, but this is all part of the plan. At Seven Swans, diners’ attention is turned completely to the food, meaning every morsel is enjoyed to the fullest.
About the chef:
Chef Ricky Saward took over Seven Swans in 2018, at which point it was a vegetarian restaurant that already held a Michelin star. This was Ricky’s first head chef job, and his first venture into vegetarian cuisine. He quickly gained a flair for it and became passionate about sustainability through food. This naturally led to an interest in vegan cuisine, and by 2019, he had quietly phased out all animal products from the menu.
It wasn’t until around six months later that Seven Swans announced that it had been serving plant-based food for some time, and apparently, no one had missed the animal products. Despite the changes made to the restaurant, it maintained its Michelin star, and in 2020, Ricky Saward was officially recognised as the world’s first vegan Michelin-starred chef.
When he took over the Seven Swans kitchen, Ricky also got involved in its permaculture garden, which, at the time, only produced herbs and a few vegetables. Now, it has more than quadrupled in size and produces a range of local and sustainable ingredients for the restaurant. From these, Ricky crafts his dishes, carefully considering what’s in season (or what has been preserved for the colder months), what works together, and how to make the most of the whole plant to reduce waste.
He believes that more mainstream meat-based dishes, like caviar or lobster, are boring and require little skill to prepare. So, rather than try to emulate meat dishes, he prefers to experiment and create exciting new dishes which showcase the true potential of plants. He even avoids spices to let the local produce truly shine.
Dining and Cooking