It’s the first day of autumn, they say. The first day of winter, more like. It had been raining from the morning; 200 meters above my hotel the rain turned into snow, 100 meters higher and the snow stopped melting. As I am writing this in the evening, the meadow outside my hotel’s window is completely white. And it was +20ºC just yesterday. My holidays start well.
My first holiday Brettljause is another disappointment. Glös-Alm has been on my list of places to visit since a long time, as I remember eating one of my first Brettljausen there during my very first visit to Ramsau ages ago. I don’t remember being particularly impressed by it, and now I see why. It’s a boring, supermarket’y thing of the sort I did not think existed with 25 kilometers of the Dachstein. Cutting the industrial Speck, Wiener and Extrawurst thickly was a sad attempt to make the dish look authentic. The Verhackertes hardly had any flavor at all, and the same could be said about the two types of cheese, their only taste coming from the pepper powder they had been sprinkled with. The best impression came from the half of a smoked sausage, which was not as tough as it looked (I am having a bit of a tooth problem nowadays, so such details are important), and the horseradish, which was satisfyingly strong.
Presentation is also not Glös-Alm’s strong point. The cook must have thought hard how to decorate the board, and could not come up with anything better than to leave tiny slices of paprika, one-eighth of a small tomato and a single slice of a cucumber on a side. Totally pathetic. And, to add insult to injury, the mustard came in a half-liter industrial tube.
I know I may be too harsh on poor Glös-Alm – it was nearly empty today because of the snow, and perhaps the cook simply went home, leaving the young waitress to do his job. If a Brettljause like this had been served in Vienna, I might have given it an average rating. But come on, Styria, we know you can do better.
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