Brunico Centrale

I doubt there is a more tourist restaurant in Bruneck than Zum goldenen Löwen. It is the first restaurant one sees when walking down the town’s main street, and a huge menu in different languages installed in the street’s middle is impossible to miss. To the restaurant’s credit, however, there are no pictures of available dishes, and the opening hours are totally Italian – meaning no food between 14:00 and 18:00.

Somehow, I was craving for spare ribs, and having realized that the nearby Forsterbräu had exactly the same menu as I had seen in Meran and Bozen (the spare ribs there were edible, but not very good), I decided to give the Löwe a chance.   

An exceedingly friendly waitress told me that the dish would take some time, for it was getting prepared from scratch. I didn’t believe that, of course, and the ribs I got 20 minutes later (not that long at all) indeed looked pre-cooked and only warmed up and finalized in the oven.

The meat was very tough, reminding me of spare ribs in the old-days Strandcafé when a cook left them on a charcoal grill for too long. My fork bent immediately and futile attempts to straighten it only helped for a minute or so. The knife was also quite useless at separating meat from bones, so at the end I switched to using fingers.

Despite their dryness and toughness, the ribs were actually quite tasty. The marinade was good, and though the cook had slightly overdone with salt and pepper, the result was satisfying, especially when I came across a few burnt bits. The only supplied sauce was an industrial sweet and sour Chinese one, but it worked surprisingly well. A baked potato, served as a side dish, had a tasty yogurt-based cream on it, and it doubled as a second sauce, effective at reducing saltiness and spiciness.

Overall, I was positively surprised by Zum goldenen Löwen. Yes, it is touristy, but at least a half of the tourists I saw at the other tables were Italians, and that is always a good sign.