Sarah Wiener
German-Austrian chef, entrepreneur and politician
Biography
Sarah Wiener (born 1962) is a German-Austrian chef, entrepreneur and politician known for her television cooking shows, her restaurants and her campaigns on food education. Her career spans professional kitchens, public broadcasting and, between 2019 and 2024, a seat in the European Parliament.
She was born in West Germany to the Austrian writer, cyberneticist and restaurateur Oswald Wiener and the visual artist Lore Heuermann, and grew up with her mother in Vienna. At seventeen she left a girls' boarding school and spent time hitchhiking across Europe. After opening her first restaurant in Berlin in 1999, she built a small network of cafés and restaurants in cultural and scientific venues, among them the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Academy of the Arts, the Museum for Communication and Futurium. She also ran restaurants at the German Museum of Technology and the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. Her first cooking series, co-produced by Arte and ORF, aired from 2007 to 2012, and from 2018 she hosted a weekly radio programme on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. In 2007 she founded a non-profit foundation to encourage healthier eating among children and teenagers, and over time her public work took on a more campaigning character, including links with the food quality group Foodwatch. Since 2015 she has run an organic farm in the Uckermark region. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her restaurants and catering business filed for insolvency.
As a Member of the European Parliament for Austria from 2019 to 2024, within The Greens, she sat on the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development and acted as rapporteur on pesticide regulation in the European Union. In January 2024 she announced she would not stand in the 2024 European elections and would leave active politics at the end of the term.
Her legacy lies in the overlap of restaurant work, television and food activism, and she remains known for her interest in organic farming and nutrition education.
Key contributions
- Restaurants in museums and cultural venues in Berlin, a model of neighbourhood-style cooking inside public institutions.
- Cooking programmes for Arte and ORF, which made her known across German-speaking Europe.
- The Sarah Wiener Foundation, devoted to healthy eating among children and young people.
- An organic farm in Uckermark, linking her culinary work to agricultural production.
- Her role as rapporteur on pesticides in the European Parliament, from the agriculture committee.