Beyond Peaks: The Cuisine of Schloss Schauenstein

Most books about Swiss restaurants never reach English-speaking readers, which makes this one worth attention on those grounds alone. Schloss Schauenstein is a three-Michelin-starred restaurant operating out of an eighteenth-century castle in Fürstenau, guided by deep relationships with the growers, artisans, and craftspeople whose work defines the kitchen's ingredients. Andreas Caminada and Marcel Skibba's cooking is precise, seasonally anchored, and genuinely creative: fermented asparagus with barley and juniper, roasted duck with rhubarb and pine.

The book's ambitions are matched by its physical conception, and here a candid word is necessary:

Two paperback volumes sit in a shared hardcover case, one devoted to Stories and photography, one to Recipes. The idea is that each can be browsed independently. In practice, opening Beyond Peaks requires substantial table space because one is effectively opening two large books.  Anyone intrigued by a photograph in the Stories volume will face a frustrating cross-referencing exercise: Stories, when open, obscures roughly forty percent of Recipes. The finished dish photographs live in one volume; the recipes that produced them live in the other. This is a design conceit that should not have survived contact with a physical mock-up, and it will test the patience of anyone who wants to actually cook from the book.

The creativity on display rewards the determination required to access it. But the determination required is real.

For serious collectors and the most committed restaurant-kitchen enthusiasts, with eyes open.

Hardcover.  Two linked volumes. Color photographs throughout.