Elements Menu at Ullrs Gourmetstube

In charming St Anton am Arlberg (the cradle of alpine skiing), the Galzigbahn cars stop running at 16:15. By 18:30, when the kitchen at Ullrhaus begins to plate its first amuses, the collective mood in the village has shifted: boots off, lanterns on, the day’s adrenaline metabolizes into something quieter and hungrier. Inside Ullrhaus, the designer-led hotel that opened in 2021, a creatively disciplined flurry is in motion. The hotel boasts both à la carte dining for visitors and guests on half-board in their Wine & Dine and a much smaller restaurant-within-a-restaurant occupies what the owners call the Gourmetstube: an intimate sage and timber-beamed room where the nine-course “Elements” tasting menu is laid out for those who book well ahead. The latter is, by most measures the trade uses, an exceptionally ambitious table.

The credentials are real: two toques from Gault Millau in 2024 and 2025, a score of 14.5/20 that places it among Tyrol’s notable kitchens, a 2026 Star in the MICHELIN Guide, ninety points from Falstaff. Chef de cuisine Erkan Cakir conceived and developed the Elements menu together with host Michael Gfall, himself a chef of long standing in the Arlberg, whose creative input and regional expertise played an essential role in its development. The discipline of that symbiotic culinary relationship shows in every plate that leaves the pass.

The Proposition

What is more intriguing than the awards is the proposition. The menu’s tagline reads: Nordic Air. Japanese Spirit. Alpine Soul, and Cakir and Gfall mean them literally. There are those kitchens that do fusion as garnish — a smear of yuzu kosho on an otherwise European plate — and there are kitchens that do it structurally. Ullrs sits firmly in the second camp. Each course is built around three tiers: a premium protein, a fermentation or umami treatment weaving in Japan, and an alpine or northern ingredient (gentian, rowan berry, spruce, mountain pine) functioning as the connective thread. A review of the tasting menu leaves one thinking: this should not work. And yet, it does.

The Menu

The amuse-bouche quartet is the manifesto. Bluefin toro draped over crisped nori with ponzu opens the evening as pure Tokyo. A hazelnut-miso-galangal bite immediately recalls the fjords. Then a glossy short-rib cube glazed with BBQ eel arrives skewered atop a porcelain dome, like jewelry. This is comfort food rendered as sculpture. A duck chawanmushi, served in a hollowed eggshell beneath a savory foam, closes this quartet with a Japanese custard tradition recast through alpine bird. Four bites, three continents of culinary thinking, a single coherent voice.

What follows holds the line. The hand-dived Norwegian scallop is treated almost austerely — fermented apple, taro, sea herbs, a wasabi punctuation — its sweetness amplified rather than masked. The “Shellfish Essence” verges on theatrical performance: a black, patterned taco shell perched on a wooden plinth, filled with king crab and a tomatillo sphere, while a white-gloved server pours the clear amber broth tableside, the air briefly heavy with warm shell-stock. The Miéral pigeon, raised lovingly free-range in Bresse, dispatched and plated with beetroot, purple shiso, and the salty tang of umeboshi, drawing both Gallic earthiness and Japanese sourness into the same gravitational field. By the time the buttery Atlantic turbot arrives lacquered with fermented mushroom, walnut, and shaved truffle, the kitchen has earned that swagger.

A “Mountain Pine” pre-dessert — sudachi, rose hip — does the work a good cleanser should: not a glass of sorbet, but a re-tuning of the instrument. Then the desserts. Zen Stones, built around an Original Beans Yuna EdelWeiss 37% white cocoa, paired with spruce and soba cha, is the rare alpine dessert that’s neither chocolate (by default) nor strudel (by custom). It tastes as you imagine it would, like a brisk walk through the woods above the village.

The Pairings

The wine pairings — labelled simply Elements — are the work of sommelier Céline Pinna, curated and presented by her tableside with the patience, discipline, and budget of someone who has the great fortune of being given free rein. It opens with a Malat Brut Reserve from Kremstal (a proper Destination of Origin Austrian Sekt, not some token aperitif), then climbs cleverly: a 2020 Molitor Zeltinger Sonnenuhr Riesling with just the right blend of stone and citrus fruits to brighten the sea scallop, followed by a taut Bernhard Huber Malterdinger Weissburgunder from Baden for the crab. The fruity-earthy profile of Domaine du Vernus Régnié elevated the rusticity of the pigeon. A personal favorite, the rich, complex 2016 Castello di Ama Chianti Classico San Lorenzo was an exceptional match for the lean venison; so too did the spicy minerality of Kollwentz’s Gloria from Leithaberg for the turbot. Instead of a sweet wine for the pre-dessert, a Mountain Pine Negroni; finally, a 2006 Château Guiraud Sauternes, properly aged, accompanied the chocolate. Stylish, idiosyncratic, and unmistakably her own.

The Setting

Service is unforced and eager. Owner Franziska Alber and her team run the floor with a Tyrolean warmth that takes the temperature down a degree or two from the seriousness on the plate. The bread service alone could potentially overwhelm, an Ullr-stamped slab of brown butter and quenelles of cultured lemongrass butter, another whipped and blended with fermented garlic, as well as miso butter, all presented beside a cress garden the diners clip themselves. This would, we expect in some places, be the meal’s set piece. Here it is but a footnote.

The room itself is the Ullrhaus aesthetic at its most distilled: forest-green banquettes, fluted timber, sage walls, sconces that suggest reading-light rather than restaurant-light along with a bevy of lit candles. Cozy and serious in equal measure — the Scandinavian instinct toward hygge rather than minimalism.

Elements is one of the most genuinely original tasting menus in the Austrian Tyrol right now, executed by a tight kitchen whose discipline exceeds its ego, and paired by a list with real point of view. For a destination synonymous with après-ski schnitzel and tartiflette, Ullrs Gourmetstube is what arrival looks, tastes, and feels like.