Pork or Beef

I am always very suspicious of restaurants that serve their spare ribs in many different flavors. I might be old-fashioned, but I believe that marinade is something to be applied to the meat before it gets cooked, not after. The Werkstatt clearly thinks differently, and I can almost agree that its approach has the right to exist. However, this restaurant takes the flexibility to the next level by offering its customers to choose if they want pork ribs or (more expensive) beef ribs.

The only implication of this is that the meat, the marinade and the sauces are kept separate up to the point a customer places an order. As I ordered a mix of three types of ribs, I ended up with one “classic” rack (meaning no marinade at all) and one rack that was half “beer-honey” and half “chilly-cheese.” That did not look natural.

Mind you, the marinade was actually fine. A lot of it fell off the ribs while I was eating them and got devoured later with the baked potato that I had ordered as a side dish. (By the way, this restaurant seems to be an expert in baked potatoes.) It was the “classic” rack that made it clear that the meat was far from superb. Definitely pre-cooked, it was quite fat and a pain to detach from the ribs. Moreover, it contained a number of tiny bones that I had to carefully extract in order not to damage my teeth. When no marinade was present, the only taste came from the two sauces, served in small firmly closed containers, branded with the restaurant’s name. One was of a weak garlic kind, while the other had a similar whitish color but contained curry. I am not sure I liked them, but no sauce would have been worse.

As a “Lego” of spare ribs, the ribs of Werkstatt were far from bad. I could not help thinking, however, that had the restaurant concentrated on a single marinade and a single animal, the result would have been much better.