This Michelin-Star Restaurant In Vienna Is A Paradise For Vegetable Lovers

21.08.2023 - 09:51 / forbes.com

TIAN, an entirely vegetarian Michelin-star restaurant in Vienna, won me over with the epigram on the paper menu. “Here’s to the spinach nobody likes, the fennel nobody gets,” it began, being no less adorable for being derived from a famous Apple commercial. It included evocative pairings like “badass quince” and “sassy chanterelle.” (For what it’s worth, these also work well as terms of endearment.)

That’s because Croatian-Austrian chef Paul Ivić sees vegetables as what they are: a potential source of fun. The name TIAN comes from the Chinese word for “heaven” as well as a French vegetarian stew. While a personal health challenge led him to get the animals out of his cooking (though he still enjoys a good Wiener schnitzel here and again), he hasn’t seen the vegetarian palette as a limitation. Rather, it seems to have given him room to let his creativity thrive.

His backer, Christian Halper, says that “truly well-made, healthy, vegetarian food is integral. It’s why we spare no efforts to combine our own high standards for extraordinary cuisine with our pleasure and delight in experimentation. For this, we draw on a multitude of rare and all but forgotten vegetables, fruit and assorted grains, their unmistakable aroma and valuable nutrients.”

He’s not joking. When a couple of journalists visited TIAN last month, we were treated not only to excellent meals but also to a tour of Arche Noah, a farm and seed bank outside the Austrian capital that’s out to save a diversity of valuable, rare and endangered cultivated plants. It nerds out (in a good way!) pretty quickly—when I asked a staffer to suggest some seeds for a friend who wants to grow climbing beans (which he can’t find at all where he lives), he gave me nearly a dozen options—but there’s no doubt that their produce is delicious.

We found the same level of quality and commitment at other producers, including the oils and spices Safranoleum, the low-intervention Sankt Laurent and Blaufränkisch wines made by Rosi Schuster in Burgenland, and the Gruner Veltliner made by Loimer in Langenlois, all of which also feature on the menus, of course.

TIAN opened in 2011, long before vegetarian fine dining was a trend. It became the first vegetarian restaurant in Europe to earn a Michelin star, and won it four toques by Gault & Millau. Halper and Ivić have since expanded the group to include the casual TIAN Bistro in Vienna’s Spittelberg neighborhood, where the mostly vegan tasting menu takes the more relaxed format of sharable plates, and, at least for a few more days, a summer pop-up in Croatia.

All of them take fairness as a foundation. (The place has a Michelin green star too.) Ivić says he focuses on “the true meaning of sustainability in high-end