The Austrian ski resort of Obertauern must be a very jolly (albeit pricey) place to be in winter. In summer, it’s a real ghost village. Even the bus driver got a bit surprised when he heard I wanted to go there. Leaving the bus at over 1700m over the sea level, I was met with strong winds, a weather that was changing every few minutes and the atmosphere of lazy construction and reconstruction.
It looked as if everything was being rebuilt. Do skiers really destroy hotels so much that each summer they have to be reconstructed almost from the ground up? Out of the dozens of Obertauern’s inns, only three were operating – and that according to the booking.com site; my own count did not ever reach that number. Even the SPAR supermarket, the only one in the village, closed at 13:00. And when I say the reconstruction was “lazy,” I mean it: despite all the trucks and dust and dirt, I did not notice anyone working particularly hard. Perhaps by the end of summer the motivation would go up.
From what I have learned, in summer only three Brettljause locations are available. One of them was closed on Mondays, the other looked too touristic to be any good, so I have settled for the Dikt´n Alm, which promised a few ingredients out of own production. Dikt standing for Benedikt, in case you are wondering.
Well, in reality it was located so close to the bottom station of a ski lift that any thoughts of authenticity should have been killed straight away. On the other hand, in Obertauern one cannot be too far from a ski lift anyway. It’s basically a village of ski lifts with a few hotels and restaurants squeezed in between. In Dikt´n Alm’s case, there was at least a sense of a family actually living there. And the Brettljause was manufactured with more attention to detail that most skiers are capable of appreciating.
Salzburg’s famous “grey cheese” was present, yet looked more white then gray. I guess the further south one goes, the less stringent the standards regarding Graukäse become, and this is a good thing, since the white powdery stuff that the yellow spongy stuff turns into after some time is quite good. I absolutely tolerated the liver pâté and the Blunzen, too, on the account of them not articulating their taste too much and being quite sparse. The Speck, though tasty, was one of those over-salted types that become an effort to eat after just a couple of bites. The ham and the Schweinbraten, on the other hand, were perfectly fine, as well as the hard sausage in a pepper crust. The sliced cheese and the Wiener sausage were very generic, however, which pointed to their supermarket origin more than in the case of any other ingredients.
These minor complaints aside, Dikt´n Alm has provided a solid and well-rounded Brettljause with no surprises but no major drawbacks either. If you, like me, don’t ski and are thus destined to come to Obertauern in its off-season months, a visit to Dikt’s is well worth it.
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