Cronenberg’s Goose

I spent the last two weeks suffering from a particularly nasty flu, which left me incapable of doing anything except drinking tea and re-watching old movies. One of them was David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, which is an original and entertaining movie that is however not very suitable for watching over dinner. Since the flu had all but killed my appetite anyway, that was fine with me.

Well, there is a slightly unpleasant scene in eXistenZ when Jude Law eats a dish made of some weird creatures at a Chinese restaurant and at the end builds a gun out of the creatures’ bones and shoots the waiter. When I first saw the goose on my table at Stuwer, with its strange reddish color, bones showing through the holes in the skin and the shiny, sticky look the sauce gave it, that scene immediately came back to my mind. Did I want to shoot the waiter then? No, the waiter was actually very friendly and attentive. I did not even want to shoot the cook, though he or she had not done a very good job with the goose.

I have had two geese at Stuwer – in its original restaurant in the 2^nd district: the first one, in 2020, left me very impressed, the second one, one year later, highly disappointed. Sad to say, today’s goose in Stuwer’s new restaurant close to Schottentor was closer to my second experience, though not so miserably bad. The main problem with it was that it was too sterile, as if the cook was afraid to overdo it in any way. There was no crunchiness in the bird’s skin; the meat lacked salt and detached from the bones so easily that I suspect that the Gansl had been boiled before roasting. The meat’s taste was more similar to turkey than goose, and adding more “juice” did not help – while in some restaurants, the “juice” is simply the fat dripping from the goose while it is being roasted, Stuwer’s “juice” was a sauce with a slight flavor of mushrooms and no flavor of goose at all.

I enjoyed the red cabbage at first until I realized how oversalted it was. Later, the mixture of too much salt with too much sugar became a bit annoying, but I was still grateful to the cabbage for adding taste to the meat and especially to the bland potato dumplings.

Stuwer should be commended for starting the goose season before all the other restaurants, but I hope that the geese I will be having in the next weeks are going to be better than this one. I probably could, after some hesitation, come back to Stuwer am Schottentor for another portion of goose, but only if someone pays for me.