Overengineered

Welcome to Kitzbühel, the Lieblingsort of Austrian rich and stupid famous. Finally, there is a village with more than one street and no lack of restaurants. Actually, every house here that is not a hotel, a luxury shop or an office selling mega-expensive chalets, is likely to be a restaurant.

Centrally located Jimmy’s caught my attention immediately by the sign “Best ribs and steaks in town” (marketing does work). When I saw a single empty table outside, I immediately took it, knowing that tomorrow or after tomorrow (Friday and Saturday) I might not get the same chance. The waiter was with me within ten seconds. I have rarely seen a service so efficient. The moment your beer glass is empty, there is already a guy by your table asking if you want another one. And if you say “yes,” it will arrive before you manage to open a web page on your phone.

The restaurant has an impressive choice of warm and cold tapas, but knowing I would later take the ribs, I did not want anything special, so I went for a simple Bruschetta. It turned out to be anything but simple. I have no clue what the cook did to the bread and the tomatoes, but the former was crispy and threatened to break at any moment, while the latter was sweet and looked like plastic. I quite liked it, but as a starter it was totally overengineered.

The spare ribs were not much different. They had been marinated in some barbecue sauce to such an extent that they lost all connection to the animal they had come from. The meat was easy to remove from the ribs and had a pleasant easy-to-chew consistency, but did not taste at all like pork or anything else. One of the sauces served with the ribs was garlicky but not very tasty, but the other was a very strong BBQ sauce. Since the meat already had a similar taste, the sauce only multiplied it without bringing any interesting differences.

The ribs can be ordered either with normal French fries or with sweet ones, and as I forgot to state my preference, I ended up with the sweet potatoes, which were almost unpleasant. Fortunately, the coleslaw salad compensated for the disappointment by being crunchy and very spicy, the taste arriving with a few seconds’ delay.

Usually, I complain about ribs being too piggy, but the ones of Jimmy’s suffered from the opposite problem: too much effort had gone into their preparation. They could have benefited from less fanciness, but I suspect that would have gone contrary to all the principles Kitzbühel’s culture had been built upon.