Revisiting the Winner

The goose season has started and what is a better way of celebrating this fact than to pay a visit to the last year’s winner? After all, people who consult this site to choose the location for their goose dinners may go straight for the top recommendation, and if their high expectations are not met, they may curse me or – worse – try to find my address and ask for a refund.

Just kidding, I know that no one is reading this site except robots; Google Analytics makes this quite clear.

Anyway, if you compare this and last year’s photos of Klein Steiermark’s Gansl, the only difference is in the shapes and the colors of the plates. Thanks to the restaurant’s unique way of preparing the goose in some sort of a super-grill, the meat was fantastically tender, the same as I remembered it from the previous visits. Unfortunately, everything else became a bit less. The skin was not crunchy, except for a few obviously burned bits. The two types of cabbage have lost some of their spiciness and gained acidity. The dumpling’s subtle taste has vanished altogether; the apple was served lukewarm; and the sauce was just a brown liquid to dip the meat in, lacking any flavor of its own.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still a great Martinigansl. I have eaten enough bad and average geese in my life to say that the one of Klein Steiermark is special. It was just not as outstanding as it was a year ago. Let’s hope I simply came on a wrong day and at a wrong time. To end on another positive note, it was nice to see that the price has remained the same as last year, while the prices at many other restaurants are skyrocketing.