It looks like today I am going to break a tradition. Until now, I have never reviewed the same Brettljause twice. When it came to spare ribs and geese, I did not really care and wrote about the same restaurant repeatedly until I ran out of imagination. I have also reviewed different Brettljausen served under different names in the same restaurant. However, so far, whenever I revisited a previously reviewed Brettljause place and ordered the same dish, I checked the earlier review and the score and left them unchanged, in the worst case adding a little note.
In the case of Waldschenke Staar, I have to break those unwritten rules because the Brettljause I ate today was nothing like the one I had had 13 years ago (and forgot to take a photo of back then).
For those not in the know, the Waldschenke is a bit of a legend. Opened in the sixties, it quickly became a favorite place for diplomats (of which Vienna had never had a shortage) to hang out in. Its location was absolutely perfect: not really in Vienna, yet extremely easy to reach with a car – especially from the city’s outer districts where the richer part of the society customarily resided. Still, the restaurant was in Vienna Woods, in the very middle of them, to be exact, and the surroundings were beautiful. In a genius marketing decision, the Waldschenke chose to specialize on grilled chicken. Chicken, obviously being a universally despised bird, helped to bring people of many cultures together, and as a result, the Waldschenke is probably responsible for averting more devastating wars than we are aware of. At the expense of many many chickens.
The diplomatic fame must have also allowed the Waldschenke to remain ridiculously expensive despite being a hub of many hiking trails. 13 years ago, I complained that the Brettljause cost 11 euros; today the price was up to 20.5, and that is excluding bread. I ate a very small and sloppily mixed salad for over five euros and drank a 0.75 liter bottle of mineral for seven (less than one euro in a supermarket!). I left the restaurant 53 euros poorer and certainly not proportionally happier.
Not that I am stingy, but the Brettljause I had received would have been good for eight euros and acceptable for twelve. The Spanish-style paprika-spiced sausage was quite original, and the Speck was tasty – had it only been represented by a few slices. Unfortunately, variety was not the Waldschenke’s strong point: the two types of Speck were very similar (and fat), and apart from the paprika sausage, the dish only featured some smoked cheese (very supermarket-y) and a rather plain Liptauer. Forget about the Schweinsbraten I wrote about the last time; they are gone, and what remains is a very average Brettljause at a nice location, but completely killed by unreasonable prices.
Interestingly, the chicken remains the most reasonably priced dish of the restaurant. I recommend you stick to it.
Leave a Reply