On travelling, but failing to connect with the food on your plate.
The cakes were fantastic, but why we ended up seeking out French and Italian food in Austria.
Another essay today, this time featuring a few snapshots from last months trip to Vienna about the first time I’ve suffered true discomfort as a traveller. Me being me, obviously the reason was (mostly) food related!
I’ve almost finished up the recipes for this months ingredient which I hope to have with you all next week! In the meantime for some of my newer readers, a look back at last February’s column where I focused on Blood Oranges. Be sure to subscribe now not to miss out on future essays, recipes and features.
I think it was somewhere around day two when the highly uncomfortable and holiday dampening sense of isolation and disconnect from our surroundings started to kick in, and even though it did not last as we learned to love the city, as a traveller it was an uncomfortable experience I’m not looking forward to repeating, even though it now seems inevitable that one day it will happen again.
As our Christmas present to each other, J and I booked 5 nights mid-January in Vienna, a city quite high on our ‘to visit’ list and somewhere that seemed to tick every box for what we look for planning trips together: a beautiful city, affordable location (if you discount the cost of museum and gallery entry which is among the highest in Vienna I’ve ever seen!), lots of churches, museums, galleries and historical sites, and purportedly excellent food. Our trip to Dubrovnik had all of that in spades, and after a rather busy end to 2022 we were both looking forward to a few days unplugged from our everyday lives.
Our hotel was one of the nicest, most comfortable either of us have ever stayed in, and even though 6 days is nowhere near enough to see everything Austria’s capital has to offer we were staggered by the sheer volume of incredible art, architecture and antiquities we managed to see. We also fell in love with Viennese cafe culture; the Altenburgtorte at Cafe Central was a highlight for us both and I’ve already requested that my 30th birthday next month features a Dobos Torte. But the food? Once we’d each demolished a wienerschnitzel the size of our heads, I have to admit we were very lucky to be in a major capital city, as we ended up eating mostly French and Italian food for the rest of the trip.
Whilst as stand alone dishes the Austrian food we sampled was excellent, eating it for more than an occasional meal? We did not enjoy it. And this is something I found incredibly jarring, and struggled massively with, at least at the start of the trip.
Everyone eats. It is what we all have in common, and it was fantastic how during the pandemic we were still able to ‘travel’ by cooking our way though another cultures food to learn how others eat no matter how far away or close to us they may live. Eating whilst travelling is a way to connect even if the climate and language around you feel unfamiliar.
This is not to say that my total lack of German did not play a big part in feeding my sense of internal isolation as we started to explore. Whilst almost everyone except for our Uber drivers could speak impressive English (and I think this is because at least everyone who picked us up was from an immigrant community, and they’d chosen to learn German instead of English, now I understand a little about how German works something I’m also staggeringly impressed by) I very much got the feeling the Austrians quite rightly did not like tourists who did not at least try a few words in German first, and who arrogantly barrelled ahead in English even know they knew full well they were in a German speaking city. I’ve seen this a lot in rural France, but because my French is just about passable, I’d never experienced it.
I’ve only managed to grasp a few German words, and even those seem to come out with a French accent unless they’re similar to something in Yiddish (which I also have very few words of) as I can’t even manage to get my tongue around the pronunciations. Luckily, J’s German is fantastic and he navigated ticket purchases, table reservations and finding our drivers when they became trapped by old town Vienna’s one way system with ease, even picking up compliments on his grasp of the language. But me, unable to get by and having to turn to him to speak for me whenever someone asked me a question? He is my partner in all things but we don’t have a dynamic where I’m totally reliant on him for anything (okay, so he does most of the driving because I hate it, but I can when I want to!) I felt vulnerable; I’d never been somewhere before where the dominant language was neither English or French (or Spanish as a teenager, I took it for 7 years but all bar food words, the alphabet and basic numbers have since melted away through lack of use), or there was simply no expectation you’d speak anything but English, as it was in Croatia.
This did not help, but I think the food was the real problem.
Food is how I usually connect with anything, food is what I do every day, what serves as the markers in my head which helps me recall information, times and memories as I’m guaranteed to be almost encyclopaedic on what we were eating at the time, or earlier or later that day.
When we travel, I usually put together a document of recommendations with addresses so we can be spontaneous, but still with solid research to back it up (I’ve been on too many itinerary-driven press trips, clearly!) - we can plan to go to certain museums whenever we wish, for example, but we already know in advance how to get there from our hotel, and that it is closed on Mondays.
After doing extensive research into Austrian food jokingly under my Viennese restaurants list I added Minzon - an Israeli restaurant we sadly did not get to near the Cathedral - with the tongue-in-cheek note of ‘in case we get sick of Austrian food and need vegetables’.
Let us circle back to that first meal of wienerschnitzel. An obvious choice in Vienna for sure, but it is one of my favourite dishes, something I used to cook in our French kitchen all the time when veal was readily available, and exploring the city waiting for our room to be ready we’d landed at GmoaKeller, a traditional tavern full of local Friday lunchtime diners where I’d noted in my research the schnitzel was particularly good.
I loved GmoaKeller. The simple whitewashed room, the wooden finishes, the traditionally garbed staff, and the fact it seemed a popular neighbourhood haunt full of the type of European ‘people who lunch’ I’m used to eating plat du jour in a dining room with in Brittany or the Dordogne, business men indulging in an end of week liquid lunch, families catching up in the middle of their day, and tables of solo diners just enjoying a quick bowl or plate of something before getting back to wherever they’re going.
The menu was extensive, and full of dishes I wanted to try, from the traditional meat stews and chops, to some more adventurous choices like liver and other offal I’m not used to seeing on menus, but which I absolutely adore. But I knew the schnitzel was supposed to be good, and besides, it was what the two gentleman next to us were eating and it was indeed just what I wanted after our painfully early flight.
This is where it all started. A giant, crisp, rippled wienerschnitzel, served with the traditional German-style potato salad (abundant in way more rich and creamy mayonnaise and sweet mustard heavy dressing than I’m used to, but wonderfully delicious) and just a wedge of lemon. I loved it. The flavour was beautiful. But I also struggled to finish it; it was so heavy. I did my best with the potato salad because the flavour was excellent, but when defeated J had to explain to our waiter it was just too much, not that we’d not enjoyed the dish. Looking around the restaurant, everyones food looked excellent, but with the exception of the roast pumpkin soup a few solo diners were slurping, and a woman who had managed to get what looked like a salad loaded up with slithers of schnitzel that certainly was not on the English version of the menu, there was barely a vegetable in sight. Indeed, later on in the trip we saw other tourists sharing schnitzel: it is simply too much for one person.
This continued into dinner. Delicious dumplings piled with butter, sour cream and chopped chives for me, and lamb cutlets for him which did come with vegetables, albeit a gratin of them heavy with cream and cheese, and bacon wrapped beans, which at least for me proved too much, even when cut through with the side salad we ordered (we started ordering a side salad to share as default everywhere we went).
Internally I was desolate because there were so many dishes I still wanted to try, but I also really, really did not want to eat any more Austrian food (yes, I know my dumplings were Polish, but they seemed typical of an Austrian dumpling dish all the same).
The next morning, we visited the Naschmarkt where I was heartened to see so much great seasonal veg - even in the depths of winter - for sale. I can’t seem to find the piece (can someone help?), but I remember last year reading
write about how the food that people (read: tourists) eat out in Florence is not representative of how people eat at home, focusing on the big special occasion meat dishes, and glossing over how most home cooking is very vegetable and cucina povera1 inspired. Was, even though we saw plenty of locals eating it with gusto the Austrian restaurant food for restaurants, and people ate differently, with more vegetables, at home?This still did not solve my immediate problem though: I wanted food that would not make me feel heavy and lethargic, but also to learn to love the food around me. The slices of cake we had in the afternoons at the various cafes we loved were not the problem (you can read my full Vienna food guide here) - they’re among some of the best things we’ve ever eaten, but after a strange, expensive and slightly uncomfortable dinner at an Italian restaurant where the food was none the less delicious that night, we felt so much better after a familiar meal of ragu pasta for him, truffle risotto for me, and the biggest salad you’ve ever seen. By no means a light meal, but served with enough vegetables to cut through.
Things improved as we were charmed by everything fantastic there is to see in Vienna. There was a lot of cake. We managed to enjoy some Austrian specialities such as an excellent wurst and currywurst from a great würstelstand in the rain, I managed to try Austria’s version of beef tartare (made with minced beef which was curious yet enjoyable) and their brilliant beef consume with pancake ribbons as light starters at a bistro-style restaurant one night whilst J had an excellent burger, and in the French restaurant in the hotel I got to enjoy Austrian dumplings as a side dish served alongside plenty of familiar vegetables and an exceptional duck breast.
On the final night, demolishing yet another slice of Cafe Central’s Altenburgtorte in our hotel room after going out for a steak and seafood pasta dinner I reflected. I wish we could have seen more of the city, though realistically I knew that would not have been sustainable; aside from having lives we needed to get back to, we were both whilst mentally refreshed physically wrecked from all the walking involved in trying to pack in as much as possible and I had a limp that lasted days from pushing through. It was a wonderful trip, and I’d still recommend Vienna to anyone, but I did not feel the same sense of peace I usually do heading home from somewhere fantastic and I know it was because of the food: food dominates my life, and as I’m probably never going back to Vienna as there are still so many places I’ve yet to see there are so many things I did not eat and I now might never try.
Whilst I loved Viennese food, I aside from the cakes I can’t say that I enjoyed it all that much.
Roughly translating as ‘poor cooking’.
Rachel, I enjoyed this post! Vienna was our honeymoon destination decades ago, and I felt the same way about the food then. What I enjoyed were the wines, much lighter, brighter, and more German than what I sipped in the US. And now I am very much a fan of the Austrian Gruners. It was the crossing of cultures that spoke to me, that East meets West that was present in the markets, restaurants, and people. It is not a place I want to return to, but I am glad we got to experience it. And yes, the schnitzel is massive!
Wonderful post, Rachel, and I enjoyed following along on your trip on Instagram. I completely understand the sense of yearning, wanting to experience it all, but simultaneously wanting a plate of vegetables!