CHEF SIMON CORDES
Chef Simon Cordes was born in Bonn, Germany, and raised in Urfeld, a small town on the outskirts of Cologne. Food was central to his upbringing from the start: his mother ran a traditional household with deep culinary conviction, growing her own vegetables and insisting on quality, unprocessed ingredients. The spark that truly ignited his passion came on a family trip to Spain as a boy, where a plate of fresh gambas and his first pincho near Barcelona left a lasting impression. He understood then how much joy food could bring someone, and decided he wanted to give that to others.
After high school, Simon completed a three-year culinary apprenticeship before graduating from the culinary institute in Cologne in 2010. He then moved to France, landing at the renowned Le Château de Nantilly in Gray, a luxury hotel with an integrated Michelin-starred restaurant, where he spent a year as commis de cuisine building a rigorous classical foundation. He followed that with a year cooking French cuisine in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Driven to work at the highest level, Simon staged at Noma in Copenhagen in late 2012, then went on to work at three-Michelin-starred La Vie in Germany, the Baeren Hotel in Switzerland, and Red Bull Hangar-7 in Salzburg—a two-Michelin-star concept where the kitchen team reproduced a different world-class guest chef's menu each month.
In 2015, Simon moved to New York City, cooking at a Michelin-starred restaurant in lower Manhattan before spending two and a half years as executive chef in JP Morgan's corporate dining room. He built a parallel reputation through private and event catering before launching his own German speakeasy dinner concept. Far from the Bavarian comfort food most people picture, his cooking draws on the deep history of German culinary tradition, refined through classical French technique and modernized with lighter, ingredient-driven sensibility. Mediterranean, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, and Greek influences round out a point of view that is unmistakably European, and entirely his own.
