How It All Started

We are Jeremy and Jessica Nolen, a husband and wife duo of professional chefs who share their love of German food and culture. Here you’ll find recipes both modern and traditional!

We have both been cooking professionally for over 20 years. We met in 2007 at a French bistro named Coquette, where Jeremy was the chef and Jess was hired as the pastry chef.

Because of Jeremy’s previous experience cooking German food and Jess’s grandfather being German, we talked about opening a German restaurant together. As it turned out, there was a plan much closer to ours to open a new German restaurant in Philadelphia.

An old friend reached out and suggested we join them. The following year we opened Brauhaus Schmitz as chef and pastry chef with the owners Doug and Kelly Hager.

Many years and beers later we left Philadelphia and returned to where Jeremy grew up, in Reading, which is only about 60 miles away from Philadelphia. Looking for a change of pace from the hustle and bustle of a big city to a return to a lifestyle where we can enjoy the outdoors brought us to the area.

Where We Are Now

Now, after many years removed from the daily German cuisine and culture, we’re revisiting recipes from our past and creating new ones. Many recipes are inspired by our travels in Germany or from browsing through the dozens of cookbooks we’ve collected on German food over the years.

Some of our recipes will be traditional and some will be modern. Some will be inspired by trends in Germany now and some will be the classics you’d expect from German restaurants that used to be ubiquitous in the United States.

We hope you’ll enjoy making these recipes as much as we did creating them. If you have any recipe suggestions we can be reached at info@newgermancooking.com