Horst Pfeifer:
Any restaurant menu is the product of the chef's experiences. The dishes at Bella Luna bear the imprint of the diverse food cultures that Horst Pfeifer has absorbed during a career that took him from his family's farm in southern Germany to restaurant kitchens in northern Italy, Austria, Texas and New Orleans.
While growing up in the small German farming community of Bächlingen, Pfeifer worked in his mother's garden and often cooked family meals. At 15 he began his formal culinary training, which led to a chef's degree and stints in the kitchens of luxury hotels in the Italian Tyrol and Austria.
In his early 20s, he moved to Austin, Tex., to work at Austin's Courtyard. In less than a year, he became its executive chef.
Pfeifer returned to Germany in 1986 to pursue his master chef's degree and, at the exceptionally young age of 25, completed the program with top honors in only six months. He then returned to Texas to work at the Riverside Cafe in the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin.
In 1991 the opportunity arose for Pfeifer and his wife Karen to open Bella Luna in New Orleans' French Quarter, which they did in October that year.
From that time on, the kitchen at Bella Luna has produced dishes crafted in the chef's very personal, imaginative style, which is founded on classical European principles. But Pfeifer also gets inspiration from contemporary American cooking and the grand Creole traditions of New Orleans.
Harvesting Flavors From a Convent Garden
The importance of seasoning has not escaped Horst Pfeifer. "Changing the herbs in a dish," he says, "can make it a different dish altogether."
Not long after he opened Bella Luna in 1991, Pfeifer learned that a garden of aromatic herbs and medicinal plants had once been maintained by the nuns at the old Ursuline Convent, which is just a three-minute stroll from the restaurant.
Established in 1745 by French Ursuline nuns at the request of King Louis XV, the convent still stands as the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley.
Today, once again, the fragrant scent of rosemary, thyme, bay leaf and sage wafts from the neatly arranged plots behind the ancient structure.
Only this time the gardener is Horst Pfeifer.
Along with reintroducing herbs first cultivated and used by the nuns from the time New Orleans was a French colony, he also has planted more herbal varieties, along with such edible flowers as nasturtium, to flavor his dishes at Bella Luna.
Among the 40-plus aromatic plants Pfeifer regular harvests from the convent's neatly arranged plots are borage, garlic chive, arugula, lettuces, mustard and lemon grass. In early spring, poppies offer up their seeds for breads and salad dressings. A handful of tropical fruit trees-citrus, guava, loquat and fig-occasionally supply ingredients for other of Bella Luna's seasonal dishes.