Dining in Vienna

Perhaps more than any other European city, Vienna has a lasting reverence for its culinary traditions, with white-tablecloth destinations like Hotel Sacher, Demel and Drei Husaren occupying the center stage for what seems like most of the past few centuries. But recently, a new generation has started to challenge that old order, updating the Austrian capital's traditionally formal dining scene with casual restaurants in unexpected settings, from inside museums to cheese shops and even bookstores.

Take the Dining Room (Maygasse 31; 43-1-804-8586; www.thediningroom.at), which opened last summer on a quiet lane in an outer residential district. Talk about truth in advertising: the Dining Room is very much a real dining room in a private home. With just four tables, it has the loose, informal atmosphere of a family dinner, complete with a large golden retriever as the house dog and plenty of overlapping conversations.

Despite the casual feel, the food is reassuringly accomplished, with different weekly set menus of international recipes. The owner and chef, Angelika Apfelthaler, prepares each evening's meal in her spotless open kitchen, then serves it herself with the help of a single hired staff member. The feeling is relaxed yet professional (although the same cannot be said of the house dog, Gino, who slyly swiped a roll from a diner's table when he thought no one was looking).

When I visited in mid-October, the Piedmont-inspired set menu (44 euros, or about $64 at $1.52 to the euro) started off with a lusciously warm chestnut and hazelnut soup followed by a salad of catalogue-perfect arugula leaves and sauteed porcini mushrooms dressed with a winelike balsamic vinegar. Next came a light zucchini-mint quiche with goat cheese and a cinnamon-scented tomato coulis, followed by a pasta course, gratineed gnocchi made of pumpkin, Austria's favorite autumn vegetable, and topped with fragrant truffle salt.

That might sound like plenty, but it turned out to be a mere prelude to the main course, a juicy duck breast accompanied by tangy cipollini and a rich, creamy risotto with saffron and red and green grapes. The duck was adorned tableside with a double-spray of aged Italian vinegar by Apfelthaler herself, in a manner that seemed to suggest that each customer was her personal favorite.

Beyond the personal attention and the quality of the food, it was hard not to feel lucky to be there: with room for just 12 diners and only one seating each evening, even the simple chocolate cake for dessert — a homey affair somewhere between a brownie and a fondant — felt like a special event.

Intimate seating is not exactly the draw at the spacious restaurant inside the city's Museum of Applied Art, or MAK, though it also manages to pull off some substantial magic. While most museum restaurants tend to be low-profile and barely good enough for a bite between exhibitions, Osterreicher im MAK (Stubenring 5; 43-1-714-0121; www.oesterreicherimmak.at) is run by Helmut Osterreicher, a star chef, and at least the private dining room generally requires reservations. On busy days, the larger front cafe and open dining areas out front are available for drop-in guests, though they quickly fill up with the crowds who have come to admire the museum's collections of Wiener Werkstatte furniture and decorative glass.

A veteran of the local dining scene, Osterreicher made his name serving classic Viennese dishes at the city's legendary Steirereck before it moved. At his own restaurant he offers two a la carte menus, one of traditional dishes and one of what he calls "newly interpreted" Viennese cuisine.

From the traditional menu, the clear beef soup was as fragrant and florid as a first-flush Darjeeling, balanced by the rich and slightly metallic notes of a single liver dumpling. Another classic appetizer was nearly a complete meal: kalbsrahmbeuscherl, a rich stew of cream, calf heart and lungs. The ribbonlike, spaghetti-size slices of meat did a great job camouflaging their origins, and the stew's robust flavor made for a perfect cold-weather warmer.

For main courses, I took the server's recommendation and tried the venison (18.60 euros) from the "modern" menu: five juicy loin medallions, served medium rare and accompanied by gingery stewed red cabbage, a thick demi-glace and a side of tart and sugary cranberry sauce. It was excellent, though the real winner was ordered by my companion.

It was the classic tafelspitz (17.80 euros), or boiled beef, a favorite of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. I doubt if Franz would have immediately recognized this version, served in a kitsch-cool airlinelike tray, accompanied by small bowls of grated apple-horseradish, fried potatoes and sour cream with chives. However, the note-perfect flavors would have surely been familiar: tender, slightly spicy sliced beef in a deeply aromatic light broth, surrounded by celery, parsnips and carrots.

With its updated recipes, high-style tableware and mid-20th-century-minimalist atmosphere, Osterreicher im MAK certainly pushes its modern side, though it is impossible to overlook the understated emphasis on local tradition. The drinks menu, for example, seems to be exclusively composed of Austrian wines and spirits, including a malty, reddish-brown draft beer made by Vienna's Ottakringer brewery, one of the few beers on the market that comes close to the nearly extinct Vienna lager style. Certainly there are very few museum restaurants in the world with such an unusual brew and a waiting list for reservations, but then very few of them are run by chefs like Osterreicher.

He left his earlier workplace, the highly praised Steirereck, when that restaurant changed locations a couple of years ago. As part of the move, the haute-cuisine Steirereck opened a second, low-key cafe called Steirereck Meirerei, inside the city's Stadtpark (43-1-713-3168; www.steirereck.at).

Meirerei means dairy, and Steirereck Meirerei primarily functions as a cheese shop, selling 120 varieties from 13 countries, though many are local. Fitting the theme, the decor starts out with blown-up photographs of osterkron and other cheeses before moving on to milky white walls and green floors. It feels less like a restaurant than a fashionable day spa, albeit one that smells suspiciously like Emmenthaler.

Perhaps because of the focus on dairy goods, the staff seemed uninterested in serving anything that was not cheese, though I talked them into bringing a hochzeitssuppe, or "wedding soup" (8 euros), clear beef bouillon filled with four excellent small bites: a crunchy, wonton-like crouton, a crispy strudel, a small, bacony biscuit and a semolina dumpling. The main courses of calf breast with Thanksgiving-turkey-like stuffing (12.50 euros) and Wiener schnitzel (14.50 euros) were spot-on classics, though slightly diminished by lackluster service.

It was only when I ordered a cheese course (7.9 euros) that the waiter finally found his inspiration, carving out six small portions for the Best of Austria selection: a fresh goat cheese from the Waldviertel; a wine-cheese from Styria; a creamy St. Severin and a gooey Red Monk, both from Schlierbach; Kracher, a light blue cheese, topped with a sugary syrup for contrast; and kuh le rose, a slightly sour, creamy hard cheese from Voitsberg that reminded me of a great Gruyere.

There was little chance of the waiters slacking off at my next stop, Babette's (Schleifmuhlgasse 17; 43-1-585-5165; www.babettes.at), as it has no waiters at all. Primarily a cookbook and spice shop for foodies, Babette's also serves lunch at a counter in the back.

After perusing the books, I took a seat and scanned the board for the day's offerings, starting off with a poached apple stuffed with a thick goose-liver mousse and served atop a slice of dense, raisiny fruit bread. As I ate, I was impressed by the stainless-steel nerves of the young chef. Despite appearing hardly old enough to drive, she coolly prepared each dish right under her customers' gaze: first an excellent prawn korma, a creamy mild curry filled with buttery stewed cashews and served with herbed rice, then a breathtaking chestnut-ricotta-stuffed chicken breast with celery-root puree, and warm figs in a port wine sauce.

With main courses around 10 euros, Babette's is hardly a big-ticket meal, and the lunch-only, paper-napkin atmosphere will probably not impress a date. It will, however, almost certainly impress food lovers, with its range of recipes, food histories, food-themed calendars, spices and probably the best meals anyone has ever had in a bookstore.

But for hard-core culinary cool, nothing can quite compare with the pharmacy-restaurant Saint Charles Alimentary (Gumpendorferstrasse 33; 43-676-586-1365; www.saint.info), a place so completely committed to the current buzzwords "local" and "seasonal" that many of its ingredients are gathered directly from Austrian forests by the head chef, Philipp Furtenbach, with the remainder purchased from local farmers. It is a dingy, narrow diner just across the street from the Saint Charles Apotheke, or pharmacy, and the kitchen prepares tinctures and herbal medicines, as well as vegetarian lunches during the week, with late-night dinners of as many as 13 courses, not necessarily vegetarian, available on Fridays.

When I visited, the fixed-menu vegetarian lunch (12.50 euros on my visit, but it changes daily) started off with an unsalted wild-root soup. Though it was disconcertingly brown and cloudy, it turned out to be powerfully aromatic and wonderfully concentrated in flavor, like the Central European equivalent of Japanese miso. After this was a salad of peppery green lentils, shallots and crisp slices of Jerusalem artichokes dressed with pumpkinseed oil.

The main course, a hearty porridge of spelt, walnuts, blackened red peppers and roasted pumpkins, dressed with a sour tomatillo sauce and chunks of a funky hard cheese from Vorarlberg, the westernmost part of Austria, gave the lie to the notion that meatless dishes can't be both filling and flavorful. The dessert, a creamy yogurt, was topped with elderberry syrup and something I'd never heard of: erdmandeln, or earth almonds, small, hard kernels with a coconutlike flavor that made me think of the tropics, but which, the chef-cum-waitress explained, were actually native to Europe.

It seemed like a metaphor. Just as most foreigners would consider Vienna's soundtrack to be the waltz, not down-tempo from Kruder & Dorfmeister, most of us will probably never visit places like SaintCharles, Babette's or the Dining Room, heading instead to the famous white-tablecloth places in the guidebooks. In light of the excellent meals, moderate prices and limited seating at most of the new arrivals, I'm sure that the Viennese prefer it that way.

(πηγή: www.frommers.com, 1/2/2008)