South Tyrol: Small Places, Fine Food
Updated: 3 days ago
From Sterzing to Brixen and Glurns, three houses where old walls, good food and personal hospitality still belong together.
All quotations were translated from German and lightly edited for length and clarity.
Breakfast is a surprisingly good way to understand a house.
At Haus am Turm in Sterzing, it takes the form of a buffet, but not the kind designed to overwhelm. Homemade dishes and carefully sourced products invite a second look rather than a heaped plate. The house calls it a Slow Breakfast. For once, the description feels entirely accurate.
At fink in Brixen, breakfast is à la carte. A warm broth inspired by Hildegard von Bingen has become one of the flavours I associate with mornings there: simple, savoury, quietly reassuring. The same logic continues throughout the day, with vegetables, grains, herbs and spices handled with contemporary restraint rather than historical nostalgia.
At flurin in Glurns, breakfast arrives on an étagère: bread, butter, cheese, fruit and a few carefully chosen additions. Enough of everything, without the peculiar abundance of a hotel buffet. When the weather allows, it moves outside, into the courtyard inside the little walled town.
Three mornings, three readings of hospitality. None extravagant; all shaped by the sense that somebody has considered how the day should begin. That thoughtfulness became the thread of a journey from North Tyrol across the Brenner to Sterzing, onwards to Brixen and west to Glurns, before the road returned north over the Reschen Pass.
The route links three very different hosts and houses. Yet the same qualities keep resurfacing: historical buildings brought back into daily use, serious food without unnecessary ceremony, architecture that knows when to hold back, and people still close enough to their places to know who grew the vegetable, made the table or supplied the bottle being opened at dinner.
What connects them is not a look. It is proximity.
Haus am Turm - Breakfast fink - Breakfast flurin - Breakfast Vinzenz fink flurin
photos Haus am Turm / Vinzenz © bureau rabensteiner, montamont
Sterzing — The border as a state of mind
The first stop south of the Brenner is Sterzing, or Vipiteno. It is tempting to treat the pass simply as something to get through: weather, traffic, a line on the map. For Veronika and Daniel Planer, Sterzing's position between north and south is part of its character.
“Borders and cultural thresholds always carry a certain positive tension. Here you can almost watch people arriving from the north and shedding a layer — not only their coats and closed shoes, but some of the pressure too. The first sense of ‘the South’ has reached them.” — Veronika
She talks about the movement of people through this small border town: those still hurrying south, others beginning to slow, languages and habits overlapping. Hospitality works in both directions, she says. Guests take something from Sterzing, but they also bring stories, ideas and encounters from elsewhere.
Veronika and Daniel's own small world is called Zenz: restaurant and wine bar Vinzenz, Haus am Turm and the ten Ida Apartments.
Zenz is the affectionate shorthand for Vinzenz, Veronika's grandfather, who ran an inn where the restaurant stands today. The connection is less about nostalgia than temperament: conviviality, curiosity, food and wine as reasons to gather.
“The invisible thread between all three worlds is probably us — Daniel and me — and our passion for good things, beautiful things, understatement and authenticity.” — Veronika
Veronika & Daniel Vinzenz Vinzenz
© stefano scata, montamont
Three houses, one host's eye
The houses do not repeat one another. Vinzenz, transformed in 2009–10 by Senoner Tammerle with Thomas Wiedmer, is organised around an almost absurdly generous table: 5.50 metres long and 1.20 metres wide, made from solid oak. It makes the social premise of the room quite literal."Kaminzimmer", "Alte Stube" and long communal table give eating and drinking several degrees of intimacy.
A few steps above, Haus am Turm, another Senoner Tammerle project, occupies the historic building once associated with Sterzing's mining court. Parts of the interior are said to date back to the fourteenth century, while the late-Gothic building itself is generally traced to the fifteenth. The architecture does not try to flatten those layers into a single period.
Ida, completed by ASAGGIO in 2021, turns another fourteenth-century townhouse into ten apartments. Ribbed vaults, bay windows and decorated timber details sit beside quieter contemporary interventions. Again, the aim is not spectacle but use.
It is telling that the three places feel related without looking alike. The continuity comes from the hosts.
Vinzenz Haus am Turm IDA
Vinzenz © montamont / Haus am Turm & IDA © bureau rabensteiner
Wine should say something
At Vinzenz, wine is perhaps the clearest expression of how Veronika and Daniel understand hospitality. The cellar holds hundreds of labels, but the number itself is not especially interesting. What matters is the memory attached to them.
“Wine should tell a story. Our role as hosts is to pass on the story of the wine, the person who made it and the particular place where it grew. Otherwise it becomes simply another product to sell.”
They speak about almost two decades of visiting growers, talking, tasting and forming friendships. Josko Gravner remains vivid not primarily because of his standing in the wine world, but because, during their visit, he spoke with greater pride about the cellar's energy use than about accolades. Another defining encounter was with Gianfranco Soldera, who spent half a day with them at his estate in 2012.
The same attention shapes the kitchen, but without turning locality into a dogma.
Bread is still something they go and collect themselves. They point towards Peter Frank's Panerie as another bakery worth following. When produce is not from their own garden, one important source is Thomas Zössmayr's Waldförsterhof near Sterzing. Cheese comes from a small network of farms across different South Tyrolean valleys.
But lemons may come from Sicily. Fish arrives through a trusted supplier near Brescia. Piemontese beef comes from butcher Franco Cazzamali, chosen because of how he works rather than because he happens to be nearby. This is a more useful definition of regionality. Not everything needs to come from twenty kilometres away.
Proximity can also be a relationship.
The principle continues upstairs. Furniture is made with Tischlerei Erlacher; selected pieces and jacquard bed linen come via Plinio il Giovane. Lamps were developed with the architectural team and produced in small workshops. Ingredients for the house cosmetics come from Kräutergärten Wipptal around Wiesen and Pflersch. There is even family honey, produced by the grandfather's bees around the Schlern area.
Veronika and Daniel still like ordering things themselves.
“The brief exchange belongs to it. Otherwise everything becomes reduced to transactions, and that makes no sense to us.”
That thought stays with me on the road south.
Daniel Vinzenz Vinzenz
© stefano scata, montamont
Brixen — Giving the whole house back a life
fink did not begin as a hotel either. The Fink family has been part of the house since 1896, when Johann Fink took it over as an inn and butcher's shop. Florian grew up with the family business; Petra comes from a hotel family herself.
For their generation, the decisive moment arrived during Covid. With parts of the large historic townhouse no longer fully used, the pause created room for a bigger question.
“Covid gave us the space to ask ourselves again: What should this house look like for our generation? What do we want to inherit, what do we want to change, and how do we want to take fink into the future?”
Their answer was to reactivate the whole house. Floors that had long been underused became nine suites, extending hospitality vertically from the restaurant into the rooms above. For Petra, adding beds also felt natural: coming from hospitality herself, a house devoted to receiving people somehow seemed incomplete without somewhere to sleep. This is a small but relevant urban gesture.
Historic centres often remain lively at street level while upper floors lose their purpose. At fink, people once again occupy the building from the arcades upwards.
fink fink fink
© fink
Less, but better placed
For the transformation completed in 2023, Stefan Gamper was responsible for urban planning, architecture and construction management, while ASAGGIO developed the interiors. Centuries of accumulated fabric were uncovered rather than polished away: walls, vaults, arches and traces of previous uses. Against them sits a restrained palette of lime, wood, terrazzo and black steel.
Petra and Florian explain the result better than any material schedule could:
“When we walk through the house and think, ‘this is fink’, it is rarely one spectacular moment. It is the combination: a centuries-old wall next to a very clear form, old wood, natural lime, black steel, quiet light, a simply laid table or a dish made with just a few good ingredients. Perhaps this not-having-too-much is our strongest signature.”
Custom furniture by Frener Design, black-steel work by Elle Costa and lighting from Viabizzuno carry that language into the things guests touch and use.
Nothing needs to shout.
The old house remains the strongest presence in the room. The same is true of the Thermae in the courtyard, where bathing, sauna and steam room occupy old vaulted spaces rather than behaving like a separate spa inserted into the building. Here, history becomes useful again.
Florian & Petra fink fink
© fink
The monastery, translated
The kitchen follows much the same logic. Florian works with principles associated with Hildegard von Bingen and monastery cooking, but without attempting historical reconstruction.
“We are not interested in cooking historical dishes. Florian translates the thinking into a contemporary, reduced cuisine: digestible, clear and very conscious in its use of ingredients. Vegetables, herbs, grains and spices play a particularly important role.”
One thread leads to the Naturbackstube Profanter, with whom fink developed its Klosterbrot, using ingredients including galangal and bertram. Another leads to the Marxenhof, the family's main partner for organic salads and vegetables in Brixen. Wine opens a route towards producers in the Eisack Valley, including Kuenhof. And the monastic connection eventually takes you beyond fink to Kloster Neustift, where architecture, agriculture, wine and religious culture have coexisted for centuries.
Architecture and cuisine begin to mirror one another. The historical house is not reconstructed as it once was. The historical food is not reconstructed either. Both are read carefully. Then translated.
fink fink fink
© fink
Everyday South Tyrol
Petra and Florian also resist reducing Brixen to a scenic stop on the way to the mountains.
“We are less interested in the South Tyrol of the big postcard motifs than in everyday South Tyrol: the products, seasons and people, the existing structures, craft, agriculture and monastery culture.”
Brixen makes that argument easy. You can walk beneath the arcades in the morning, be with a winemaker not much later and end the afternoon high on the Plose. City, wine country and mountains coexist within the same day.
Across all three houses on this journey, good food comes without much prescribed ceremony. Guests can stay upstairs or walk in from town, order one plate or several, drink a serious bottle without turning dinner into a seminar.
Quality is present. It is rarely announced. Then the road turns west.
Glurns — A place that only works here
Inside the walls of Glurns, Thomas Ortler runs flurin in a tower whose foundations date to the early thirteenth century. Over time it served as a seat of justice and administration, later as a prison, and eventually as a carpenter's workshop.
The current chapter began with Thomas's father, Fred Ortler, and his friendship with carpenter and former owner Leonhard Prieth. Prieth cared deeply about what would become of the building. Before deciding on a permanent future, the Ortlers tested what sort of life it might hold. During the Glurns Advent they opened a pop-up in the old workshop. Street food between workbenches. Loud music from Berlin. People came.
“They loved it, and we realised that the place had a very particular magic. We still try to protect that magic today — its form, its shell, its character, its asymmetric, rustic beauty. If we lost that, everything would become interchangeable.”
It is difficult to imagine a better starting point for flurin. Not a mood board. A room full of people.
Thomas Ortler Thomas Ortler Thomas Ortler
Thomas Ortler © thomas tribus
Something worthy of the house
The Ortlers worked with architects Werner Pircher and Roberto Waink on the transformation. Thomas describes the collaboration as unusually free. The family had ideas but not always the architectural knowledge to turn them into space. Pircher and Waink translated and developed those ideas without losing sight of the building's existing character.
“We worked together to create something worthy of the building. It was never about prestige, and I think that was our strength.”
That attitude is legible in the finished house. Contemporary interventions remain precise, but the old tower retains its irregularity and weight. One of Thomas's favourite details is tiny by comparison: the suite keys carry miniature wooden versions of the Flurinsturm, carved by a young maker from the valley. Perhaps that says more about the place than another large design gesture could.
flurin flurin flurin
© patrick schwienbacher
Cooking with common sense
Thomas describes flurin's culinary concept with an almost suspiciously unfashionable word:
Hausverstand. Common sense.
“First we look at what food is actually available in our region at that particular time of year. Only then do we write the menu.”
That leads to farmers such as Peter Bertagnolli in Glurns, the Spanglerhof in Mals and Sunnfolt in Kortsch, alongside hunters and livestock farmers in the surrounding valley. The cuisine is not detached from the region, but neither does it need to reproduce a traditional canon dish by dish. The ingredient comes first. The menu follows.
Again, the result feels relaxed rather than ceremonial. One can eat a full sequence or something smaller, drink at the bar or stay upstairs and return the next morning for that breakfast on the étagère. Fine food, without the stiff collar.
flurin flurin flurin
© patrick schwienbacher
The people you do not see
When Thomas talks about who really makes flurin work, he does not begin with himself. Nor with the architects. He thinks of those who rarely appear in hospitality stories.
“A house like this never reaches a finished state. It is constantly changing, it needs care, and at the same time it keeps creating new possibilities. At night too, there are people looking after it — cleaners, caretakers, craftspeople, everyone who puts their heart into it every day. They are the ticking clockwork that often remains unseen.”
It expands the idea of authorship. A place is shaped by the host who imagines it. By the architect. By the cook. But also by the person who knows which old window needs attention before winter, who resets the room after everyone has gone home, who notices the hinge before the guest notices the hinge. Atmosphere has to be maintained.
Beyond the front door
By Glurns, the journey has already generated far more threads than can fit into one trip. Thomas points towards Eduard Bernhart in Tartsch and his high-altitude Altissimus wine; towards Ernst Patscheider and aftmult for speck and cheese; towards brothers Urban and Karl Winkler in Mals, who worked on flurin's historic windows; and towards the Morterer Alm for what he considers the best Kaiserschmarrn around.
Veronika and Daniel's map heads towards Pranzegg, Bad Schörgau, Casa al Sole, Gasthof Pirpamer and Aquarol.
Petra and Florian point towards Profanter, Marxenhof, Kloster Neustift, Kuenhof and the Plose.
At some point the hotels stop being destinations. They become orientation points.
Smallness as a choice
Leaving Glurns, the road climbs towards the Reschen and another border. By then, what stays with me is not a particular suite or dish, but a question of scale. Not square metres. Human scale.
Small places are not automatically good places. Nor is local always better, historical automatically authentic or handcrafted inherently meaningful. But smallness can create a particular working condition: enough proximity for people to notice who has entered the room, who grew the vegetable, baked the bread, restored the window or made the table.
Petra and Florian imagine fink's future without making it larger or louder.
“For us, the future does not necessarily mean growth. It can also mean understanding what is already there more deeply, strengthening relationships, becoming more consistent — and perhaps even removing a little more.”
Veronika and Daniel are wondering whether progress may even mean becoming smaller again.
“More and bigger is not our path. We are thinking about less again — more of ourselves and more time with our guests.”
Thomas has already been asked whether flurin could be reproduced elsewhere. His answer might be the simplest expression of the entire journey.
“flurin only works here — and, in a way, so do I.”
He and his family have since taken on other places in Glurns, including Wirtshaus Steinb.ck and Weisses Kreiz. But they are not intended as flurin II and III. Each is meant to find its own character.
In Sterzing, Brixen and Glurns, old walls matter. Good food matters. Carefully designed rooms matter. But what connects the three houses is simpler. The people behind them are still close enough to be felt. And from each front door, another thread begins.
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Further Threads
Panerie / Peter Frank, Sterzing — A small independent bakery recommended by Veronika and Daniel as someone working with a similar instinct for product and craft.
Kräutergärten Wipptal — Herbs from Wiesen and Pflersch that travel into the Zenz world.
Guggenbräu, Jenesien — Grain grown and beer brewed within the same small operation.
Marion & Martin Gojer / Pranzegg — Wine as farming, personality and another reading of South Tyrol.
ASAGGIO — One architectural thread linking Ida in Sterzing with the interiors of fink in Brixen.
Naturbackstube Profanter — The bakery behind fink's monastery bread and a collaboration built around Hildegard von Bingen's principles.
Marxenhof, Brixen — Organic vegetables and salads close enough for season and availability to shape the kitchen directly.
Kloster Neustift — Architecture, wine, agriculture and monastery culture meeting outside Brixen.
Kuenhof — One of Petra and Florian's wine threads into the Eisack Valley.
Eduard Bernhart / Altissimus — High-altitude wine from Tartsch, recommended by Thomas Ortler.
aftmult / Ernst Patscheider — Speck and cheese made in the hamlet of Ulten near Mals.
Urban & Karl Winkler, Mals — The brothers whose restoration work on flurin's historic windows continues a local craft thread.
Morterer Alm — Mountain cooking with local produce and, according to Thomas, a Kaiserschmarrn worth the detour.
Wirtshaus Steinb.ck & Weisses Kreiz, Glurns — Thomas Ortler's next hospitality chapters, conceived as independent places rather than copies of flurin.
