I must admit that when I tag Aichingerhütte with “nice view,” I base it solely on my assumptions. In my actual experience, I could hardly see the restaurant itself from the road, despite its being mere 15 meters away.
Generally, visiting the Dobratsch mountain on a day like today was a complete waste of time. Not only did the fog limit the visibility to just sufficient to avoid accidentally stepping off the mockingly-named “panorama path” and falling from a cliff, but two out of three restaurants in the area were closed, and by the time I reached Aichingerhütte, the rain had turned from a minor irritation into a major annoyance.
I knew I had to spend at least two hours in the hut waiting for the bus’s arrival, so I had to make sure I ate the Brettljause really slowly. Fortunately it was big enough: the Liptauer (I hope it was a Liptauer because it did not taste like one – or like anything, actually) and the Verhackertes alone required half of the provided bread slices. Besides, there were two types of Speck (serving two Speck types seems to be a very Carinthian thing), Schweinsbraten, Salami, a hard sausage cut so thinly that it was almost indistinguishable from the Salami, and a thick slice of a nondescript cheese. I did not really appreciate how the Liptauer was spread all over the Salami, or how the Schweinsbraten were full of tiny cartilage pieces that made unpleasant noises on my teeth, or the unexplainable stinginess of the cook when it came to horseradish, but finally these were minor inconveniences. The quality of the meats was sufficient to make it an above-average Jause, and the pickled cucumber was probably the best tasting cucumber I have ever tried that did not come out of a can with Cyrillic letters on it.
For a place with no alternatives today, Aichingerhütte was absolutely fine.
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