We’ve been wanting to go on a trip to former soviet countries for a few years. Our goal was to catch them before they became too much like their Western European counterparts, but give them enough time away from the Russians to redevelop a sense of nationalistic pride.
To ease ourselves into the ex-Hapsburg empire, we started in Vienna. The place for food is along the Graben pedestrian area. Rumor has it that when the Turks were driven out of Vienna in 1683, they left lots of coffee behind. The Viennese developed a taste for it, and little restaurants specializing in it started opening up along the Graben. People referred to them as cafes.
Nowadays, you can’t walk 50 feet (or 15 meters) along the Graben without passing a cafe. Customers generally wanted a little food with their coffee, and in 1832, Franz Sacher invented a torte with chocolate and a hint of apricot jam that became a huge hit – big enough for his son to buy a hotel at the end of the Graben. One afternoon, we went to the cafe at the venerable Hotel Sacher, only to find a line of about 100 American tourists. My normal goal is to avoid American tourists (isn’t that why we travel outside the country?), so I tried an alternative plan. I checked to see if the hotel had a bar. They did. It was a gorgeous, antique cobalt-blue affair with lovely flowers and overstuffed furniture. And it was empty. I asked the bartender if we could order coffee and a torte, and he said, absolutely. Comfortably ensconced, we tried the torte. It was truly awful, like brown cardboard and Cool Whip. But the coffee was good, and we were comfortable and alone until a patrician Austrian couple in their 80s came in for a very civilized afternoon coffee. In the meantime, throngs of American tourists were waiting an hour to sit in the cafe on rickety cane chairs, elbow to elbow in a country that still loves smokers.
We stayed close to the Graben at the wonderfully comfortable and quite reasonably priced Pension Suzanne. We wanted to be close to a highly touted restaurant at the end of Graben by Kohlmarkt. Oddly, it’s in a grocery store, yet is considered by Austrians to be one of the top five restaurants in the country, with a large and vocal contingent proclaiming it No. 1.
The grocery store is called Julius Meinl am Graben, and it must rank as one of the great gourmet groceries on the planet. Julius Meinl began in 1862 as a coffee seller, selling green beans to the local residents. Back then, people would roast their beans in cast-iron pans on top of the stove, a system that always ended with a lot of burnt beans sullying the coffee. Meinl had the bright idea to buy a high-quality roaster and sell his customers freshly roasted beans. That idea was popular enough to create a chain of markets. They opened a statement store on Graben, and it’s a Dean & DeLuca on steroids. The store is about the size of the old Whole Foods on Sixth and Lamar, but every inch is devoted to the best quality gourmet foods available.
The restaurant is on the second floor. It is an unassuming place for a gastronomic temple, but it is very comfortable, and they have a gorgeous view out large picture windows down the Graben. We had to make reservations six months in advance to get a table. It was worth it. My two dining partners ooed and aahed over their meal, but I was lost in reverie over mine.
The restaurant had just gotten in two softball-sized white truffles, both nearly smooth and pungent enough to smell 10 feet away. Their white truffle menu offered five different dishes. When a plate arrived, they would bring out the truffles, with a scale. They’d weigh the truffle, then shave as much as you would like onto your dish, then weigh it again and charge you for the difference. The price was 6.50 (about $8.75) per gram, or $3,980 a pound, certainly a luxurious price, but not much more than the cost of truffles in the store, and there was something classy about being the master of your own plate.
I started with a Fried Egg on Creamed Spinach (8), which was a small bed of finely chopped spinach, lightly sprinkled with cream, sitting under a perfectly fried egg. I had them add about one gram of white truffle. The juxtaposition of the rich egg and cream with the earthy spinach and even earthier truffle was sublime. Next up was Cream of Chestnut Soup (8). The Viennese love fresh roasted chestnuts; the little street-side cookers are almost as ubiquitous as the cafes. Here, the chestnuts had been ground fine, doused with cream, and cooked until the cream took the essence of the chestnuts. The soup was then strained, seasoned, and brought to the table. This time, I had about two grams of truffle. The final course was a buttery Tagliatelle (7). To me, this is white truffle’s highest calling: butter, pasta, and truffle. I hit about four grams this time.
As you can tell, things can get pricey fast. I didn’t care. Sell my car, I want more truffles.
Julius Meinl am Graben is also home of the best wine list in Austria (so claims a wine-savvy friend we made sitting at the bar). I have always thought of Barolos and Barbarescos with white truffles, since both are from around the town of Asti. I now have a new favorite white-truffle wine: Grüner Veltliner. That is the result of the sommelier’s pick, F.X. Pichler’s Grüner Veltliner Smaragd “M” (50).
The rest of our trip through Eastern Europe never produced a meal as exciting as the one at Meinl. The Poles and Czechs are trying to jump into the 21st-century Western world by imitating what they think we like. That means fancy places that remind you more of the Marriott restaurants, and people’s food restaurants trying to be McDonald’s. Consequently, there is an inverse proportion between quality of food and closeness to interesting tourist sites.
The best meal we had in the former Soviet bloc was in the Czech Republic, in the small town of Star Jic ín, about half-way between Ostrava and Olomouc at the Restaurace Zámec ek Pod Hradem. The dish is a traditional one called kachna, zelí & knedlíky. It was a duck breast and wing (kachna), with crispy skin and all the fat rendered, yet juicy and tender. It rested on a bed of the best sauerkraut (zelí) I’ve ever had, made with big hunks of red cabbage sauerkraut, caraway seeds, onions sautéed in lard, finely grated potatoes, and a little flour and sugar. The texture was different from German sauerkraut, with the potatoes lending creaminess to the consistency. On the side was a huge dumpling, about the size of a baseball, which had been cut into half-inch thick slices and fanned around the plate. These dumplings are made from flour, eggs, milk, and leaveners, but into the mixture, they drop half-inch cubes of yesterday’s bread. The result is a gorgeous checkerboard of breads in a tasty patty, made a little richer with a touch of duck fat.
Other than that superb meal, the culinary treat of both Poland and the Czech Republic was beer. Pilsner Urquell tasted different in the Czech Republic and ended up my favorite. Before I get letters from the beer police, I tried Ostravar, Staropramen c ern, c erná 13°, Litovel Svce tl Leák. I kept going back to the Pilsner Urquell. In Poland, my favorite brew was Zywiec, but the most memorable drink was something called Old Krupnik, an 80 proof liquor made from honey. Passover Slivovitch, at 120 proof, still had a touch of plum aroma, but burned like the devil.
I’ll leave you with a little bit of hard-earned culinary advice. If you want a fancy meal in the areas I traveled, go to Austria. Otherwise, for the whole area around Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, you just have to follow two restaurant rules. Stay away from tourists, and, no matter where you are, you can count on good beer and sausage. The most interesting version was in Vienna (and no, their sausages aren’t the little canned things we get here). There, in a little shack on the wrong side of the Hapsburg Palace, locals line up for a baguette, hollowed out and stuffed with sausage links. That and a beer, and life looks pretty good.
This article appears in December 29 • 2006.
