I perfectly remember the time when Strandcafé was little more than a hut, consisting of two rooms. The slightly bigger one was smoking area and not even the best food could justify staying there for more than a couple of minutes. The smaller room was almost cozy, but only when not packed with people – which meant, like, never. In winter, it was also freezing cold.
Featuring a huge outdoor area, the restaurant was extremely popular in summer, but from late autumn to mid-spring it lost most of its clientele. Yet, I still remember that old Strandcafé serving traditional goose during the Martinigansl season, despite the fact that 90% of people went there for the famous spare ribs.
Times change, and after a major renovation and a period of legal troubles (during which the restaurant had to close down twice), Strandcafé now features a vast indoor non-smoking space, but somehow it has managed to become even less cozy than the old hut I remember. If twenty yearly ago the restaurant looked like a somewhat dysfunctional but charming business, now it is a food factory, catering for the needs of huge groups of people, such as attendees of congresses and conferences. While waiting for my goose today, I was observing a few such groups (with 20 or more people in each) and wondering what memories of Austrian cuisine those conference participants were going to take back home.
Enough nostalgia, let’s switch to the Martinigansl. Like always, I started by trying the cabbage and the dumpling before touching the bird, and ended up with quite a shock. The red cabbage was unexplainably bitter. Initially I thought that some chestnuts mixed with it were to blame, but I could not find any trace of chestnuts. The potato dumpling, on the other hand, was cold. Not lukewarm, but really cold on the inside. It was extremely bland to start with, but in the cold state it was absolutely disgusting. It stayed on my plate nearly untouched until the end.
The first bites into the goose positively surprised me. The skin over the “meaty” parts was golden in color, really crispy and well-salted and had about a millimeter of fat below it, which is the threshold up to which the fat is welcome. The moment that good part of the goose was gone and I switched to the tougher meat around the bones, the good times were over. That remaining meat was tough, hard to detach and completely flavorless. Suddenly I was again looking at the “tourists” around me, who were ordering all kinds of stuff that one should never order at Strandcafé, and I felt like a conference participant myself, who landed in an unfamiliar city and obviously made a wrong food choice. Which left me with the only reasonable option: to finish as quickly as I could, pay and leave.
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