Of Mice and Geese

Though totally a cat person, I have nothing against mice. Unless they are rats. Actually, a couple of day ago, while drinking beer at my favorite pub in the city center, I watched the waiter and the cook standing outside, curiously looking at a cute brown mouse eating the leftovers of the restaurant’s flatbread. (Thinking back, I wonder if those leftovers did not contain some sort of poison.)

Today at Giersterbräu, I witnessed not one but several mice roaming freely across the restaurant’s spacious garden. And though I still have nothing against mice (again, unless they are rats), I must admit that multiple mice are far less cute than a single one. In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that without the mice, my today’s goosing experience would have been more pleasant. However, even then it would have been a mixed bag.

The 6^th of October is an awfully early time to serve traditional St. Martin’s geese, and only a handful of restaurants do that this week. Of all of them, Giersterbräu was the only one I had never visited before, which is strange, since normally I get automatically pulled towards any restaurant with “Bräu” in its name. True to the name, Giersterbräu serves its own house beer, though I doubt it is being brewed in the same building. The dark sweet beer I ordered was quite enjoyable, having a slightly sour flavor of something freshly brewed.

The goose, on the other hand, did not taste fresh, which is a shame considering that the Martinigansl season had just begun. Some meatier parts of it were really good, actually, with tender meat combined with crispy, well-salted skin. Closer to the bone, the meat unfortunately got much tougher. It also did not help that the bird had not been warmed up sufficiently. It was only warm at its best and got almost completely cold in the 15 minutes or so that I spent eating it.

The cabbage was lukewarm, but at least crunchy and not too sweet. Two bread dumplings were big and generally edible, but uninteresting – OK for cleaning the plate from the brownish, slightly sticky sauce, but bland by themselves. The presence of lingonberry jam and a slice of orange, as well as a possibility to choose between goose leg and breast when ordering suggest that Giersterbräu tried to respect traditions, but to really attract customers, it needs to work on the quality of the goose itself. At the end, I was not especially surprised that several tables in the garden were occupied by English speakers – obviously participants of some conferences. Either they ended up at Giersterbräu by accident or (less likely) were more mice-tolerant than the locals.