Markus Stöckle opens Marküs in a 700-year-old Zurich house

Markus Stöckle has opened Marküs, his new restaurant in Zurich's old town, inside a building that has served food and drink for 700 years and once hosted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The address, Glockengasse 7, previously housed Kaisers Reblaube. Its upper floor keeps the historic Goethe Room intact, with 13th-century wood panelling preserved around it; downstairs, Milan's Studio Dragó has fitted modern, red-lacquered walls that make no attempt to match the age of the building around them.

A menu built with ETH Zurich

Fermentation science under a ceiling older than the Swiss constitution is either genius or theatre.

Stöckle's tasting menu leans on fermentation, developed in collaboration with ETH Zurich, the city's technical university. Älpler Makkaronen, the Alpine pasta-and-potato dish usually served in mountain huts, is reworked into something closer to fine dining; a fillet from Lake Zurich comes with a fermented soybean sauce more familiar from Japanese kitchens than Swiss ones.

That mix draws directly on Stöckle's own path: Bavarian by background, trained in Japan, shaped further by a stint in the multisensory kitchen of The Fat Duck in England and by Spanish technique. Marküs is where those influences meet Swiss produce rather than sit apart from it.

A new chapter after ROSI

The restaurant marks Stöckle's return to his own kitchen after closing ROSI, the Zurich restaurant he ran from 2018 to 2025. He has described the new project as "alles, nur kein Wirtshaus", everything except a traditional Swiss inn, a pointed line for a chef opening inside a 700-year-old former tavern.

Marküs opens evenings only for now, with lunch service planned for a later phase, a pace that suggests Stöckle is prioritising getting the format right over filling covers immediately.

The move also lands as debate over what a tasting menu actually costs to put on a table continues elsewhere in Europe, and alongside another chef-led reopening in Dublin, where Adam Nevin relaunched Glovers Alley with its own tasting format this month.

For Zurich's old town, better known for fondue tourism than fermentation science, Marküs is a wager that history and laboratory technique can share a dining room.