Sternberg was not my first choice for a goose dinner today (in the place I wanted to try, the goose season was already over), but I had heard good things about it from my colleagues. The restaurant was also well known to me from office lunches and occasional family dinners many years ago. To me, it always looked “not bad,” but not so great as to visit it often.
It took almost half an hour for the dish to arrive, which I considered a good sign. It came with the goose’s leg wrapped in aluminum foil and with an extra hand wipe, the kind that is usually provided with spare ribs. I should have taken that as a warning, but I was too hungry to think about it.
The first bite was delicious. The skin was crispy, the meat was hot and very tasty, and “8 out of 10” was my first thought. It changed to a more reasonable “7 out of 10” after a couple of bites, once I discovered quite a lot of not-so-pleasant fat while the crispiness all but disappeared. Things went sharply downhill afterwards.
The cabbage, when I tried it, had a strange combination of too much salt and too much sugar, to the extent that it was utterly unlikable and unfinishable. The sauce that the goose was swimming in was very thick and too sweet, which was OK while it was still warm but became quite disgusting in a cold state. And there was plenty of time for the sauce to become cold, because the closer I got to the goose’s bones, the tougher its meat became. After a while, the knife was unable to slice the meat, so I had to revert to the barbarian method of tearing the bird apart with my teeth while holding the bone by the foil.
The whole fight with the bird was far too much work for the pleasure that I eventually got out of it. Although initially I thought that Sternberg had improved a lot since my last visit years ago, eventually its tough goose confirmed my past impressions: not too bad, but not worth the effort.
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