Tim Raue

Tim Raue is a German chef and the chef-patron of Restaurant Tim Raue, a two-Michelin-star establishment on Rudi-Dutschke-Straße in Berlin-Kreuzberg, ranked among The World's 50 Best Restaurants every year from 2014 to 2022 (peaking at No. 34 in 2019). His cooking — which he describes as 'Asian-inspired without being Asian' — draws principally on the spice palettes of Sichuan, Thailand and Japan, applied to European luxury ingredients with the precision of classical French haute cuisine, and served entirely without bread, butter, sugar or starch as side dishes.

Raue's biography is one of the most unusual in European fine dining. Born in West Berlin in 1974, he grew up in Kreuzberg in conditions he has repeatedly described as defined by his father's violence and the family's poverty; from the age of 13 he was a member of the 36 Boys, a Turkish-German street gang that dominated his neighbourhood in the late 1980s. He began a restaurant apprenticeship at age 16 at the Berlin hotel Inter-Continental, principally to escape his father, and worked through the kitchens of Rockendorf's Restaurant and Restaurant Bamberger Reiter — the latter under the demanding tutelage of Franz Raneburger — before being appointed head chef at the age of 24 at the E.T.A. Hoffmann restaurant in 1998.

His breakthrough came at Restaurant 44 in the Swissôtel on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, where he was head chef from 2003, and especially at Ma Tim Raue in the Hotel Adlon Kempinski (2007–2010), where he developed the Asian-European style that would become his signature and won his first Michelin star. In July 2010, with his then-wife Marie-Anne Raue as restaurant manager, he opened Restaurant Tim Raue in the former Berlin Wall checkpoint area of Kreuzberg. It earned its first Michelin star in November 2011 — eleven months after opening — and its second in November 2012. It has held two stars uninterrupted since. The Tim Raue group now includes the casual Asian La Soupe Populaire (Prenzlauer Berg, until 2018), Studio Tim Raue (a Tokyo-inspired private dining room), and consulting work for hotels and the German national rail catering brand. Raue has appeared as a judge on the German seasons of The Taste, Kitchen Impossible (host since 2017) and MasterChef, and is widely considered the most publicly recognisable fine-dining chef in modern Germany.