Lindbergh is a funny little restaurant that you may be excused for not knowing about. The only reason I ended up there was because of an online article I accidentally came across and the restaurant’s own nicely designed website. Its location on a dark street in the residential 14th district is not really the one you would explore looking for good restaurants, but the two-story bright blue building that Lindbergh occupies stands out starkly from the surrounding depressing apartment blocks.
For whatever reason, the restaurant is named after Charles Lindbergh, an American pilot famous for the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris in 1927. I found this somehow ironic because the goose I came to eat at Lindbergh is obviously not going to fly much anymore. I always have bad suspicions when I enter empty restaurants, so today was happy to see almost all the tables occupied, with people eating predominantly goose. According to the website, Lindbergh serves sous vide geese, which I have learned to be a good sign. Usually, dishes prepared that way taste fresh, and during the COVID lockdown take-home sous vide geese were always a highlight for me. The other good sign was that the restaurant offered both goose legs and breasts, indicating that it buys whole geese and not only pre-cut frozen legs as I saw in many other places.
The Gansl was indeed good, very good even. The leg I got had a lot of meat, and although it was slightly dry and “sandlike” occasionally, I liked its taste and its non-fiber-y texture. The slight dryness of the meat was more than compensated by the thick and amazingly tasty sauce. The cook is obviously an expert when it comes to sauce making. A bit strangely for a sous vide goose, its skin was not at all crispy, as if the bird did not stay in a high-temperature oven long enough. The skin did not taste bad, but had it been crunchy, I would have probably given the dish one additional point. A lack of crunchiness was evident in the red cabbage as well, though there was nothing wrong with it taste-wise. The potato dumpling was a very pleasant surprise, since despite its wobbly texture it had a great taste of finely seasoned fat.
At 28 euros per portion, the price looked reasonable considering the quality, but I found the restaurant’s decision to charge extra for the berries and sweet chestnuts (bringing the total price to over 32 euros) a bit questionable, mainly because there were too much of them. If it were up to me, I would have served a half of the berries and chestnuts but included them “by default,” increasing the price to 30 euros. But this is a very minor grumble, of course; in everything else, with Lindbergh I have learned one more good goose-serving location that I can now recommend to others.
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