Jelly and blood sausage. These are the two ingredients that I truly dislike in a Brettljause (though I can perfectly accept them in small quantities as a way to foster variety). Unfortunately, these are the two of three ingredients that feature heavily in this poor excuse for a Brettljause, the third being ham of a bland featureless kind, the one that would be sold in a shop under the label “ham” with no details whatsoever.
There is a lot of that stuff on the plate, to be fair. There is also a lot of salat, lamb’s lettuce (hopefully the right translation of Vogerlsalat), tomatoes and Pfefferonis. There is even a very hot Paprika there as well as a cheese-stuffed Paprika (the absolute highlight of the dish), plus a small bowl of industrial mustard. Unfortunately all together they make for a very boring and unbalanced Brettljause. I could not finish it, even with the help of the totally unimpressive wine.
The restaurant itself is tourist-oriented to the extreme – there are actually pictures of the dishes in the menu – and although the service is efficient enough, the waiter’s answer “Better too much than too little” to my polite remark that my unfinished Brettljause was too big made me wish I could kill him.
By the way, the Schreiberhaus belongs to the Huber family, which used to own a rather cozy wine place on the other side of the road some 20 years ago, later sadly turned into a Kindergarten and then into a shop of some kind. The thing is, there was a poster with a poem “Da Huaba”, written in Viennese dialect, decorating the wall of that place, which today I have discovered in the Schreiberhaus, hanging in the cellar next to the toilets. It did create a feeling of nostalgia for a minute or two until my bladder reminded me of higher-priority things to do.
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