A Loser

Although the Loser Mountain in Styria might never reach the tourist popularity of the village of Fucking (quietly renamed to Fugging recently), it still has stuff to offer apart from the silly name. The panoramic road is the main attraction, of course, offering beautiful views of the lake Altaussee and enough curves for masochist motorcyclists to break their necks at.

Unfortunately, at the end of every scenic mountain road there are inevitably an ugly parking area and a generic restaurant. Today the parking lot looked even less attractive than usual because of the numerous vans of a German film crew that occupied most of it. (There were more vans and a few containers higher on the mountain’s slope as well.) The restaurant is the Loser-Alm, which can serve a welcome cold beer if you have spent past two hours climbing a steep path, but whose Brettljause is best forgotten.

Out of the five ingredients – Speck, ham, Verhackertes, cheese and Hauswurst – there was not a single one that had not come straight out of a supermarket. While chewing them, I could plainly imagine the packaging they arrived in, for the taste was instantly recognizable. It probably took less than half a minute to take that stuff out of plastic and hastily arrange it on the plank, adding a pickled cucumber and a tasteless red pepper for decoration. One did not even consider the stupidity of serving a bowl of industrial mustard while none of the ingredients went well with it. Cheese with mustard? Speck with mustard? They must be kidding. They cannot even spell “Brettljause” right, damn it. Sadly, with the location like the one of Loser-Alm, a restaurant does need to take care at all of what it serves. Everything will be eaten – if not by the clueless tourists, then by the German filmmakers. This fact does not make this Brettljause less of a loser, however.