Dieter L. Kaufmann

Dieter Lorenz Wilhelm Kaufmann was born on 28 June 1937 in Grevenbroich, a town in the Rhineland near Düsseldorf. He served an apprenticeship as a pastry cook (Konditor) in Grevenbroich and then trained as a chef in Düsseldorf.

He went on to work abroad. In 1958 he joined the Grand Hotel Eden in Montreux, Switzerland, and at the same time attended the hotel management school in Heidelberg until 1959. He then took a position at the Grand Hotel Saltsjöbaden near Stockholm. From 1960 he gained service experience in London, first at the Savoy Hotel, where as a young man he encountered Sir Winston Churchill, and afterwards at the Mayfair Hotel, where he stayed into 1962.

In March 1962 Kaufmann returned to his home town and bought the Hotel-Restaurant Zur Traube on the Bahnhofstraße in Grevenbroich. He ran it with his wife Elvira for more than five decades, and the couple drew on their international experience to create a style of classic, refined hospitality.

The Guide Michelin awarded the restaurant its first star in 1973 and a second in 1983, and Zur Traube held two stars for 27 years until 2009. Gault Millau named Kaufmann Chef of the Year in 1994, and the magazine Der Feinschmecker gave him the same title in 2000. In 2003 the restaurant received the Robert Mondavi Trophy. His parfait of sturgeon with caviar became his best known dish.

Zur Traube became a destination for gourmets from around the world and for prominent guests. Its guest book included the federal president Walter Scheel, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, the North Rhine-Westphalia premiers Heinz Kühn, Johannes Rau and Wolfgang Clement, the entertainers Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff and Trude Herr, the racing driver Stirling Moss, the football coaches Hennes Weisweiler and Udo Lattek, and the riders Fritz Thiedemann, Reiner Klimke and Alwin Schockemöhle. Kaufmann also met the British prime minister Tony Blair.

Kaufmann closed the restaurant in March 2014, in his 77th year, after 52 years in charge.

Kaufmann was married to Elvira Kaufmann, who ran Zur Traube with him throughout its history and was widely credited as an equal partner in its success. In 2018 the couple sold the Gründerzeit era building that housed the restaurant, which was placed under heritage protection that year, and they marked the sale with a farewell event in the house. In March 2024 they gave their collection of menus, recipes, books and handwritten documents to the German Archive of Culinary Arts in Dresden, founded by the Technical University and the Saxon State and University Library, and the larger part of the collection, including photographs, guest books, press coverage and audiovisual material, to the Rhein-Kreis Neuss district archive in Zons.

Dieter L. Kaufmann died on Saturday 17 October 2026, aged 89. His death was reported by the Rheinische Post in Grevenbroich on 20 October, citing consistent media reports. The place and cause of death were not made public.

The hospitality trade newspaper AHGZ said that Kaufmann had shaped German top gastronomy with his restaurant for decades. The food critic Jürgen Dollase, a longtime companion, described him as a formative personality and praised the elegance and distinctiveness of his cooking and the culture of fine dining that he and Elvira had passed on to their guests.

Kaufmann was one of the chefs who established German haute cuisine in the second half of the twentieth century, holding two Michelin stars in a small Rhineland town for more than a quarter of a century. Zur Traube put Grevenbroich on the culinary map, and its building is now a listed monument. The collection he and Elvira assembled over half a century is preserved in archives in Dresden and Zons, documenting the history of German gastronomy.