Hotel Bareiss – three Michelin stars in a family's Black Forest valley

In the hamlet of Mitteltal, on the edge of Baiersbronn in the northern Black Forest, Hotel Bareiss has grown from a modest guesthouse into one of Germany's most complete resort hotels, still run entirely by the family whose name it bears. The hotel opened in 1951 and today has 100 rooms, run by Hermann Bareiss and his son Hannes, with around eighty per cent of guests returning year after year. At its centre sits Restaurant Bareiss, where chef Claus-Peter Lumpp has cooked under three Michelin stars since 2007 and is counted among Germany's leading chefs. The MICHELIN Guide gives the hotel itself Three Keys, placing Bareiss among the small number of European addresses where architecture, service and kitchen are judged to work as one. Add a 100-room pool and sauna landscape, a forest park with its own deer enclosure, and two further hotel restaurants, and the result is a resort built for long stays rather than passing visits.

01The house

Hermine Bareiss took over a guesthouse in Mitteltal after the war and built the Kurhotel Mitteltal on a plot nearby; the hotel opened in 1951 and the family has run it ever since. Her son Hermann joined in 1966 and took charge in 1973, and it was under his direction that the gourmet kitchen was first given its own identity. The hotel's restaurant collected its first Michelin star in 1983, a second in 1984, and the third, under Claus-Peter Lumpp, in 2007. A free-standing open-air pool and a penthouse floor were added at the end of the 1980s, and in 1991 the house was renamed Bareiss after the family itself, repositioned as a holiday and family hotel rather than a spa cure house.

Among the hotel's outbuildings is the Morlokhof, a farmhouse built in 1789 that still belongs to the estate and is now used for events and gatherings. The street outside, once the Gärtenbühlweg, was renamed Hermine-Bareiss-Weg in 2014 in honour of the hotel's founder. Hannes Bareiss, the fourth generation, has stood alongside his father since 2009, and the hotel today employs an estate of around 270 staff across its hotel, restaurants, farm and outposts.

02Rooms and suites

The 100 rooms, apartments and suites are split between the main house and a separate country house, furnished in Black Forest or cottage styles rather than a single uniform scheme, each designed to give guests an undisturbed private sphere. Fresh fruit and flowers, higher-grade cosmetics, Beauty & Spa welcome bags and small daily extras are included as standard, alongside the hotel's half-board arrangement. A Bareiss stay also comes with free run of the pool and sauna landscape, the gym, the house library, the forest park and the House of Games, plus a holiday programme that runs for both adults and children throughout the year.

Insider tip

Baiersbronn's restaurants hold eight Michelin stars between them; book Restaurant Bareiss well ahead.

03Where to eat

Restaurant Bareiss is the reason serious diners come to Mitteltal at all: an intimate, formal dining room serving only a limited number of covers at lunch and dinner, built around chef Claus-Peter Lumpp's classical French cooking with Mediterranean undertones and a notably generous hand. Lumpp trained under Alain Ducasse, Eckart Witzigmann and Heinz Winkler, did his own apprenticeship at the hotel when it was still called Kurhotel Mitteltal, and returned in 1992 to take over a kitchen that already held two stars; he kept those two for fifteen years before the third arrived in 2007, and it has been reconfirmed by the Guide's inspectors every year since. As of autumn 2026 the tasting menu and shorter lunch menu are priced in the low hundreds of euros, reflecting the restaurant's Four-Euro-sign positioning and its deep southern German and French larder, from Black Forest game to Bresse poultry. Front of house is led by maître Thomas Brandt, with sommelier Jürgen Fendt, who keeps his own vineyard where Bareiss trainees get hands-on experience in viticulture.

Two further restaurants complete the gastronomic programme. The Dorfstuben occupy two original nineteenth-century parlours and serve Black Forest specialities, while the Kaminstube turns to European classics; both accept reservations from non-residents, as does Restaurant Bareiss itself. Guests who want to try everything can book the house's Gastronomic Trilogy: a four-course dinner in the Dorfstuben, a five-course dinner in the Kaminstube, lunch at the three-star restaurant, and an aperitif taken in the wine cellar.

04The wine cellar

Rather than a conventional cocktail bar, Bareiss channels its drinks culture through its wine cellar, where the Gastronomic Trilogy arrangement ends with an aperitif among the bottles sommelier Jürgen Fendt has assembled over decades. Fendt's own vineyard doubles as a training ground for the hotel's apprentices, giving the cellar list a hands-on, growers' sensibility rather than a purely collector's one.

05Spa and wellbeing

Bareiss Wellness spreads across a pool environment, a sauna world and a Beauty & Spa wing with its own cosmetics studio, massage studio and hairdressing salon. The main pool runs a comfortable 28°C and measures 16 by 6 metres, large enough for proper lengths rather than just floating, and sits alongside a 38°C whirlpool, a children's paddling pool, indoor and outdoor seawater pools, and a natural bathing pond with its own sunbathing lawn. The sauna world adds a 90°C Finnish sauna, a bio-sauna, herbal and rose steam baths, a Kneipp walking pool and an indoor Fireplace Lounge for the quiet, post-sauna half hour that regular guests rate as highly as any treatment on the menu.

06The neighbourhood

Baiersbronn, a scatter of hamlets along the Murg valley in the northern Black Forest, is improbably stacked with Michelin stars for its size: the current Guide awards eight stars across four restaurants in the village, with Restaurant Bareiss and the Schwarzwaldstube at Hotel Traube Tonbach each holding three, and 1789 and Schlossberg one apiece. That density, rare anywhere outside a handful of world capitals, draws diners from Strasbourg, Stuttgart and Baden-Baden for weekend tables, while the surrounding forest and hiking trails give the valley an entirely different, quieter character by day.

07Making the most of a stay

Beyond the dining rooms, the Bareiss Forest Park offers a sunbathing meadow, a barefoot trail, a rock waterfall, a trout pond and a petting zoo with ponies and West African pygmy goats, while a nearby enclosure of some 15,000 square metres is home to a herd of fallow deer. The hotel's own outposts, the Forellenhof Buhlbach, the Morlokhof farmhouse and the Sattelei hiking cabin, are reachable on marked trails and are worth the walk for their own kitchens as much as their history. For a rainy afternoon, the House of Games keeps pool, roulette, backgammon and bridge tables upstairs for guests who fancy rediscovering an old habit.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.