Three Lands View

My by far favorite Austrian TV program is “Weather Panorama,” which every morning shows mountain landscapes from all around the country. It generates good ideas for my future holiday destinations, in addition to providing just the right level of demotivation before another day in the office. However, as time passes, watching the Panorama more and more brings up good memories of past trips rather than suggests new places to travel to. I know Austria too well, I am afraid.

The two notable exceptions of the mountains my foot has not yet stepped on were the Steinplatte and the Lofer. While knowing that they are both kind of close to Germany, I did not realize that they were also within hiking distance from each other. Reaching them with public transportation requires very different trips, but once there, you can walk from one to the other without a significant effort. I went to the Steinplatte two days ago, and decided to skip the Brettljause there because the restaurant by the top cable car station was self-service and very crowded. Today on the Lofer, however, there were not one but three restaurants (and many more on the way back into the valley), so a Brettlauase was unavoidable.

True to its name, Berggasthof Schönblick offers a very nice view from its terrace. Were it less cloudy, I could have, most likely, seen the city of Salzburg from it. Still, today I got a really good outlook of the main peaks of Salzburgerland, Tyrol and Bavaria – all without leaving the table. (And also of an empty snowmaking reservoir – hardly a pretty sight.) The food for the stomach was just as good as the food for the eyes. The Jause was quite varied and even contained three types of cheese, one of them, cut into small cubes, actually rather strong. Instead of Schweinsbraten, Schönblick offered slices of cold Stelze. While usually tasty, Stelze often features rubbery, hard-to-eat skin, but it was perfectly chewable in Schönblick’s case.

The choice of pickles was satisfyingly unusual, including a picked carrot. How does a picked carrot taste, you might ask. Well, strange. But try it out yourself to make your own opinion. Finally, the restaurant served a Bavarian beer, Schönramen, which I have ever heard of. In fact, finding Bavarian beers is not rare in these parts of Austria, and although I am still to discover those I really like, they offer a nice alternative to the common Kaisers and Gössers.

The only thing I did not appreciate at Berggasthof Schönblick was the industrial tea butter, still wrapped in aluminum packaging and highly annoying to unwrap and cut. At a location in the middle of alpine pastures with mooing cows all around me, I had expected something more genuine.