The Ungoose

If anything, Waldgrill Cobenzl is reliable. You can rely on it to serve you a goose when all other restaurants have already forgotten how a goose looks like. You can also trust it to provide you with consistently bad geese. If you are dying for a dreadful goose, look no further.

I knew it was bad the moment the plate was put in front of me. Actually, a couple of seconds earlier, for the smell that reached me first was nothing gooselike. It was a smell of something old, something that had spent the past couple of months deep in the freezer, feeling its friends leave one-by-one and wondering when its own turn would finally come. It was a smell of an unhappy bird – unhappy to have died, but even more pissed off of having lived a short uneventful life, dreaming of green juicy grass beyond the factory’s walls but never actually seeing it.

The stupid thing is, even given such a small, sad and undoubtedly cheap goose, the restaurant could have turned it into something half acceptable by simply adding a bit of salt and keeping it in the oven under very high temperature for a few minutes longer. That would have turned the goose’s skin crispy and hopefully change its color from sinister gray to a healthier brown. But no, the only thing the cook apparently knew was how to stuff the pre-cooked leg into a microwave and push the right buttons. Even then, mistakes were made, because the meat came out lukewarm.

I tried to ignore the soft gray skin with a layer of old fat underneath and concentrate on the meat. At one point, I even felt like praising the restaurant for at least serving a decent portion. However, the meat was concentrated around the leg only. Once I tried to cut into the adjacent piece, my knife hit a bone. Actually, a half of the portion you see on the picture above is nothing but bone. Or rather bones, some of them particularly small, sharp and annoying. Add to this a rather acidic red cabbage and a potato dumpling that tasted like paper, and you can imagine why I left Waldgrill Cobenzl with a strong determination to never eat goose there again. This restaurant is the best testimonial to why Martinigänse should remain a strictly seasonal dish.