Had they existed, the regular visitors to this site would have confirmed that since a few years I quite enjoy ordering mixed salads with my Brettljausen. Partly that’s due to my advancing age, partly because of Heurige’s almost unexplainable laziness in serving a bit of vegetables. Guys, I know you usually go for the cheapest pig when it comes to Speck, but a leaf of salad is not going to ruin you. Serve it, damn it!
However, when ordering a salad, one should be careful to check out its ingredients, especially if the salad’s name sounds cryptic, like “Schichtsalat im Glas.”
You see, it’s a salad with sausage and cheese, and a damn brilliant one. Served in a glass jar, it also features celery, carrots and apples, and is very fresh and extremely filling. It’s not a salad to eat with a Brettljause or before one (like I did). It’s a full-featured dish to eat instead of other stuff.
I did not know that, of course, so once the salad jar was empty and I turned my attention to the Brettljause, I was not hungry at all. Using ingredients from the local producers, the “Kellerjause” was impressively varied, though the only parts of it that really stood out were the very tasty Speck and the horseradish or an incredible strength: I don’t remember any other Brettljause that had brought me as close to tears as this one.
While not necessarily disappointed, I was quite surprised by the lack of taste in the Verhackertes. The shredded Speck had been mixed with quite a lot of carrots and had all but lost its taste. I was not impressed by the Liptauer and the cheese either (not that I had expected to be), but the Schweinsbraten were actually quite good, just not served in a sufficient quantity to truly appreciate them.
Interestingly, the bread (for which one has to pay extra, which is fine because the Brettljause itself is very cheap) exhibited the same lack of consistency in quality as the ingredients. While the Kornspitz was very fresh, warm and quite certainly home-made, the slice of dark bread was very supermarket-y and for some reason quite damp, as if the cook had sprayed it with water to hide the lack of freshness.
Zwimandlkölla (Zwimandl incidentally stands for a two-liter wine bottle, while “kölla” is a cellar) is so far from the civilization that you will find it difficult to reach it without a car. While it is located on a traditional “cellar street,” I doubt that the other cellars around it serve any wine, possibly apart from special wine holidays. If you do reach Zwimandlkölla, however, the first few minutes you will probably be adjusting to the highly unpleasant “cellar” smell. Once the stink stops bothering you, however, I suggest you order a salad and a few glasses of wine and ignore the Brettljause.
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