Late Sunday Goose

Let me tell you as a highly experienced unhealthy hiker: there is no worse time to practice unhealthy hiking in Austria than mid-November. Had I travelled to Salzkammergut just one week later, I would have found plenty of Christmas markets, nicely decorated observation towers on top of snow-covered hills and a wide choice of restaurants, some of them possibly still serving goose. Today, on my trip to Gmunden by the picturesque lake Traun, I found nothing. OK, not completely true – the weather was great, and I could take a few rather nice photos of the lake and the surrounding mountains, – but the cable car was not operating, and not a single restaurant was open. The exceptions were a small lakeside café, where I drank a beer, and a tiny pizza-delivery place, where I went to the toilet later on and bought a can of beer as a thank-you for the hospitality.

By the time I reached Vienna, I was ravenous, and went straight to a restaurant (let’s not mention its name here, for I am still quite fond of it) that in the past had only served a goose for two. Honestly, hungry as I was, I would have possibly eaten half a goose without much effort. However, the waiter kept questioning my abilities so insistently (“Do you realize that it is half a goose, and we will have to charge you for half a goose, bla bla bla”), that I quickly got fed up and left, forcing myself to look for alternatives. That was when I thought of Jedlersdorfer Alm. Last year, I had had a really satisfying late November goose there, so I jumped on an underground train, then switched to a tram and finally walked for a few minutes on treacherously slippery pavements to reach the restaurant at exactly the time when it was starting to thin out.

If you work for an Austrian firm whose personnel include mostly non-vegetarian Austrians and you are tasked with organizing an office party, Jedlersdorfer Alm should be near the top of your list of possible venues. It provides plenty of space, predictable food at predictable prices, a good choice of beers, a friendly service and a cool, relaxed atmosphere. The location is quite remove, but that is not always a bad thing.

The problem is, last year I visited Jedlersdorfer Alm early in the evening on a working day. Today I arrived on a Sunday evening and quite late. I was therefore not very surprised that the dish took nearly half an hour to reach my table. I could almost imagine the cook swearing, “What? A goose? At this time of the day? Where am I supposed to find one?” They found one, obviously, but it tasted anything than fresh. The meat was super-tough and tried to stick to the bones with such a persistence, it was probably maintaining a hope of getting reanimated by a necromancer later on. A very sharp knife provided by the restaurant did not help much, The plate was also full of chestnuts, and while a year ago they were well-cooked and soaking in a sauce, today they were bland, lukewarm and far, far too numerous – as if the cook had decided to punish me for arriving too late by flooding me with leftover chestnuts.

On a positive side, the skin of the goose was pleasantly thin and crispy. The Alm certainly knows how to make goose skin crunchy (it is not as easy as one may think), but there was not much meat beneath the skin. Some of the crunchiest bits I found (and yes, I enjoyed them a lot) were nothing but overcooked fat. The cabbage was OK, having a slight flavor of cinnamon, the potato dumpling was traditionally boring, but the goose was acceptable, just not salty enough, not interesting enough, and insufficient for a hungry man like me.

My advice is, reserve your Martinigansl before going to Jedlersdorfer Alm. If the goose is freshly prepared, you will enjoy it much more than I did. And if it is not, you will have much better reasons to complain than me, who visited the restaurant at the worst possible time.