I totally forgot how hard it is to find a table in Meran on a Saturday. During the week, Meran is a quiet, sleepy town, but come the weekend, all the restaurants, including the most featureless pizzerias, are full. The huge Forsterbräu, which closes at midnight, had a queue waiting outside at 21:30. Most of the other restaurants do not offer any food after 9 o’clock.
After a lot of running around, I finally got lucky with Römerkeller. As I found out later, it is a chain with at least three restaurants in and close to Meran and a few in other cities. It also has a menu as long as War and Peace, offering everything from pizzas to steaks. They even serve a Marende, but being hungry, I settled for Römer Ribs instead.
That Römer guy must have been enormous, for the ribs were at least four times bigger that I had expected. For some time, I even wondered what animal they could have come from, but behind the smokey taste (not much marinade here) I could eventually recognize the flavor of pork. Still, the ribs must have come from a different part of the animal, because in addition to their abnormal size, they also had a lot of meat over the ribs, not only between them. The dish was quite barbarian, actually.
Unusually, the restaurant did not provide any dip sauces. Instead, the waiter brought a plate with small packs of industrial ketchup and mayo. The positive side of that was that I never ran out of sauce; when one pack was over, I simply opened the next one. The negative side was, well, everything else.
I cannot really criticize Römerkeller much, for it has saved me from starvation today, but I doubt I will ever try its spare ribs again.
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