This was supposed to be the day when I wrapped up my goose adventures for the season and finally crowned the Supergoose of 2017. Instead, I am writing yet another Martinigansl review.
This goose was a complete accident. Walking through the city center, I stumbled across a restaurant I did not remember having seen before. The menu outside listed something that looked very much like a Brettljause, the fact that has the same effect on me as the valerian root has on cats. A minute later, I was inside, looking at a menu written and English and Romanian, but with no German translation. There was a separate A4 sheet inside the menu, written in Romanian only, which the waitress helpfully translated for me. I don’t really remember what all the items on it were, because the very first one – a goose with red cabbage and a home-made croquette – made my choice very easy indeed.
In retrospective, my expectations were probably unreasonably high. At some point, I must have really imagined a goose prepared in some very special Romanian way, whatever that way could be – stuffed with bacon, perhaps, or cooked in garlic. Instead, I got a grey, sad and overcooked leg of a small bird, whose only distinctive feature was an unexplainable lack of salt. The consistency and the taste of the meat were those of a boiled chicken, and the skin was far too fat and not crispy at all.
The dish, which took about three minutes to consume, was saved only by the above-average orange-flavored cabbage and the rather tasty croquette. I can only hope that the goose was simply a belated tribute to the Austrian Martinigansl tradition and not a specialty of the Bukowina region, because there was absolutely nothing in it that Bukowina should be proud of.
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