Restaurant Haebel and Heimatjuwel - our Beef! favorites

April 6th, 2019 | on the road

The men (cook) magazine BEEF! presented 15 different Hamburg restaurants and bars in their restaurant guide “Best Cuts in Town”. For the past 15 months, we have had our very own “Best Cuts Tour” through Hamburg with the book and visited eleven of the 15 recommended locations. The restaurants “Haebel” and “Heimatjuwel” were our absolute favorites.

Culinary delicacies from Haebel's kitchen

When my dearest captain unpacked the book “Best Cuts in Town” at Christmas 2017, he was skeptical… A coupon book… from Beef! We are neither coupon geeks nor passionate meat eaters (because, as it was in the blurb, meat enthusiasts could go with this book for two and enjoy the invitation to a main course.).

Fabian Haebel's page in the "Best Cuts in Town" restaurant guide from Beef! magazine

Passionate meat eaters somehow, but not exclusively and mainly. We also love fish, seafood, pasta, vegetables – just the whole range – and steakhouses are usually too boring for us… But, we quickly discovered, the listed restaurants have much more to offer than “only” meat. I rather visited the burger grills with the children when our captain was at sea. I did not even know what unusual burger creations there are…

At the end we were very satisfied with our Best Cuts Tour. We visited restaurants we might not have gone to otherwise. And we got to know really great houses, great cooks and service teams! Basically, we can say that we liked the restaurants with fewer places much better than the larger ones. With 22 seats (Haebel) or 30 seats (Heimatjuwel), the service is simply more individual, attentive and welcoming than it‘s evidently possible in the large houses such as the Nikkei Nine (104 seats) or The Bank (160 seats). In any case, we felt that way.

These are the restaurants or burger grills we visited:

Basil & Mars, Alsterufer 1

Die Bank, Brasserie & Bar, Hohe Bleichen 17

Heimatjuwel, Stellinger Weg 47

Heldenplatz, Brandstwiete 46

Mash Hamburg (Modern American Steak House), Große Elbstraße 148 – 150

Nikkei Nine, Neuer Jungfernstieg 9 – 14 (in the Fairmont Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten)

Haebel, Paul-Roosen-Straße 31

Dulf’s Burger, Karolinenstraße 2

Billy the Butcher, Steaks & Burger Bar, Ottensener Hauptstraße 9

Grilly Idol Burger, Clemens-Schultz-Straße 40

clockers BAR, Paul-Roosen-Straße 27

Nowhere we were really disappointed or dissatisfied. Big differences could be made as mentioned in the service. Our favorites, very clear: the restaurants Haebel and Heimatjuwel. Both impress with really first-class regional cuisine, surprising product combinations, first-class wine accompaniments and really sympathetic, competent and passionate service. So we have visited both restaurants since our first visit again, e.g. on New Year’s Eve or recently to celebrate our Captain‘s birthday with the family. And they certainly will not have been the last visits.

Unfortunately, I did not take any photos at Heimatjuwel (yes, that happens, even if you can hardly believe it). Therefore, here are a few impressions of a wonderful birthday evening at Haebel‘s:

Nordic french cuisine im Restaurant Haebel

They serve Nordic French Cuisine. The furniture is straight and simple. No tablecloths, no batteries of cutlery. Quite to our taste. The two tables directly at the kitchen counter are highly recommended. From there you have the best view and direct contact with the open kitchen. The kitchen team is actually a team, competent and relaxed.

At Haebel‘s there is no à la carte menu, but a carte blanche menu, consisting of 5 courses and extended by several “greetings from the kitchen”. Here we were able to enjoy refined marinated oysters and other delicacies. The menu is reduced to the essentials, actually reads like a shopping list:

shellfish
spring beauty
sea buckthorn
wild boar
celery
mustard
char
caviar
beetroot
hibiscus
guinea-fowl
truffle
chard
sauce Robert
brioche
olive oil
caramel

Every single course was a successful composition, the dumpling with wild boar filling in a clear consommé with celery balls and whole mustard seeds wonderfully balanced! I would never have come up with the idea to put whole mustard seeds in this quantity into a soup – wonderful! Only the trout we did not like so much, as the tender fish could not prevail against the beetroot. All other courses were phenomenal, my personal favorite: the guinea-fowl roll with truffle and chard and a sauce Robert – wonderfully buttery-tender the meat, the chard perfect in the bite and the sauce… you could eat it with a spoon!

Top: Guinea-fowl, truffle, chard, sauce Robert - Bottom left: Shellfish, spring beauty, sea buckthorn - Bottom right: Char, caviar, beetroot,, hibiscus

We chose the corresponding wines to the menu and that was a good decision! As coherent as the individual courses were composed, so perfectly was the wine pairing. The whole unruffled and unobtrusive, but offered with wit and charm. That’s how it should be! True and perfect hosts who perform more than a job. They love what they do.

Incidentally, the location of the Haebel in Paul Roosen Street is really brilliant, as you can take your aperitif next door in the wine-bar „Le Cave“ or just a few steps to the left in the St. Pauli wine shop. The clockers BAR a few doors down the street is the perfect location to either start the evening or the following night. By the way, we also discovered the clockers BAR through the beef! book: a bit loud, but funny and with good cocktails. How good if, like us, you are allowed to sit in the back seat recently because the son has taken the driver’s license…

Happy and close encounter: in the Haebel's kitchen

At the end of our “Best Cuts Tour”, when we almost stamped the “I was here” page, my dearest captain asked me if Beef! would publish again such a book for 2019, with new suggestions? Not until now. But the Christmas present could not have been that bad…

A dream of roasted brioche, olive oil ice cream and the finest angel hair