What: For the fifth year running, Breuninger is bringing four star chefs from Baden-Württemberg into its (karls) kitchen restaurant, with live show-cooking sessions running through 22 October 2026.

Why it is important:  It shows how a department store turns fine dining into a recurring, brand-owned event format that builds loyalty year after year rather than a one-off promotion.

Breuninger has opened the fifth edition of "Rausch der Sterne," its recurring culinary partnership pairing fine dining with everyday retail. Around 130 guests attended an exclusive six-course dinner at the (karls) kitchen restaurant in Breuninger's Stuttgart flagship, prepared jointly by four Michelin-recognised chefs from Baden-Württemberg — Malte Kuhn of Malte's "hidden kitchen," Klaus Buderath and Benedikt Wittek of Restaurant Seestern, Andreas Widmann of Restaurant Ursprung, and Franz Feckl of Restaurant Landhaus Feckl — alongside Breuninger's own kitchen chef Christina Fiorentino and its confiserie team, with wine pairings from Weingut Aldinger.

Following the launch event, signature dishes from the four guest chefs are being rotated into (karls) kitchen's regular menu, with each chef appearing for a live show-cooking session in the restaurant's open kitchen on selected dates between 29 September and 22 October 2026. Michael Neef, Breuninger's Director of Food & Beverage, said the concept is designed to make Michelin-level cooking approachable within customers' everyday routines. With more than 20 self-operated gastronomy outlets across Germany, Breuninger positions in-house dining as a core, deliberately recurring part of its retail experience.

IADS Notes: Breuninger's fifth edition of "Rausch der Sterne" extends a now well-established pattern of using gastronomy to animate its flagship stores. The retailer's own Spring/Summer 2026 campaign paired fashion with haute cuisine across a multisensory, omnichannel format (Fashion United, March 2026), while a city-partnered fashion-and-food festival in Freiburg showed the tangible footfall and dwell-time gains such events can generate (Freiburger Wochenbericht, September 2025). The guest-chef format itself mirrors moves elsewhere in the sector: Manor in Geneva brought a Michelin-recognised chef's street food concept into its in-house restaurant to sharpen its dining offer and draw new audiences (Press Release, April 2026), and Dior's Paris flagship restaurant earned its first Michelin star under a dedicated culinary programme, reinforcing how fine dining is increasingly used to signal prestige and deepen customer engagement in retail settings (WWD, March 2026).

Breuninger marks five years of culinary partnership with Michelin-star chefs