There seems to be a tradition in Austrian tourist locations that I was not aware of: if someone visits a particular place for a number of years, his or her name will be engraved on the back of a bench so that other tourists could lean against it and become just as committed. Today I saw a bench celebrating a family that had been visiting the same hotel for the past 50 years. Think of it, isn’t this pure madness? Austria is a rather small country, true, but not that small as to consciously limit your holiday destinations to a single place, especially a place like Lungau.
Featuring some of the lowest mountains in the state of Salzburg, Lungau in summer is a quiet place. It lacks any spectacular attractions, many of its cable cars are not operating, and its public transportation network is surprisingly inefficient on weekends. One may conclude it’s a perfect location for doing nothing. St. Michael, one of the largest towns in the area, has a cable car to one of the most family-friendly mountains I have ever seen, and that mountain has a restaurant called Panorama Alm, located a cozy walk away from the cable car’s top station and right next to the station of another cable car that can take you down to a village on the other side of the mountain.
As most of the restaurants near cable car stations, Panorama Alm is more about convenience than quality. To its credit, its Brettljause looked quite authentic, containing thickly cut cheese and Speck. I am pretty sure that they, like the other ingredients, had been bought from a grocery shop nearby, but that does not mean that they were not locally produced. In the Austrian countryside, shops often feature local produce, and this must have been the case here, for the both types of Speck were really good, and the strange-looking salami with huge lumps of fat did not resemble any type I saw in the shops in Vienna.
I did not like the bread, which was well past its prime, but I found the two cubes of fresh butter a good idea, especially since the butter started to melt under the hot sun and thus became easier to cut and spread. Had I not been surrounded by ugly wind-blocking glass walls and had the cable car not been so visible and audible, I would have enjoyed the dish much more. Today, however, I was fully aware I was just another tourist that needed to be fed and quickly gotten rid of. It was, to a large extent, my own fault, as I arrived not long before the restaurant’s closing time, but still I left rather certain that even though I will come back to Lungau now and then, no benches here will ever bear my name.
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