The Gourmet's Guide to Europe Part 19

Hartmann's (Leidinger's successor) in the Ring, is an excellent restaurant to breakfast at. Here more of the national dishes--the pickled veal, smoked sucking pig, stewed beef of various kinds, Risi-Bisi, stewed pork--are to be found than at the restaurants mentioned above. It is rather Bohemian, but only pleasantly so.

A good word may be said for the cooking at Meissl and Schadn's, in the Karnthenerstra.s.s, and for that at the Reidhof.

The Stephan Keller (Cafe de l'Europe) in the Stephan Platz is a much frequented cafe. It was originally an underground resort in the vaults of St-Stephan, but it has risen to a higher sphere. This house is much used by the colony of artists who also are to be found at Hartmann's, Gause's, and the Rother Igel.

There are wine houses--Esterhazy Keller, for instance, where all cla.s.ses go to drink the Hungarian wines from the estates of Prince Esterhazy--without number, and many of these have their speciality of Itrian or Dalmatian wines. The summer resorts are mostly for the people only; they are b.u.t.terfly cafes opening in the summer and closing in the winter, and if their _clientele_ deserts them there are only some painted boards, tables, and benches to be carted away and a hedge to be dug out; but in the Prater there are some more substantial establishments, Sacher's, mentioned before, and the Rondeau and l.u.s.thaus, which are made the turning-points in the daily drives of the Viennese.

Vienna keeps very early hours, the cafes closing well before midnight, unless they are kept open for some special _fete_.

In the environs of Vienna there are pleasant restaurants on the Kalenberg, up which a little railway runs, and at Klosterneuberg, where one can drink the excellent wine of the place at the Stiftskeller before one admires the view from the terrace or looks at the treasures of the abbey.

Baden

Baden bei Wien is a little watering-place sixteen miles from the capital, to which the Viennese go for a "cure," and to which the Carlsbad and Marienbad doctors sometimes send their patients to begin an after cure. It is a pretty little place with shady parks and an unpretentious restaurant at the Kurhaus and another in the Weilburgga.s.se, and the walk up the valley of the Schwechat has cafe-restaurants at several of the points of interest.

Carlsbad

Probably twenty Englishmen go to Carlsbad for their liver's sake for every ten who go to Vienna to be amused, and the great Bohemian town in the valley where the hot spring gushes up is one of the resorts to which gourmets, who have eaten not wisely but too well, are most frequently sent. It is a town of good but very simple fare, for the doctors rule it absolutely, and nothing which can hurt a patient's digestion is allowed to appear on the bill of fare of any of the restaurants or hotels.

The life of the place, which chiefly is bound up in the consideration of where to eat the three simple meals allowed, is curious. In the morning, after the disagreeable necessity of drinking three or more gla.s.sfuls of the hot water, every man and every lady spends a half hour deciding where to breakfast and what kind of roll and what kind of ham they shall eat. The bakers' shops are crowded by people picking out the special rusk or special roll they prefer, and these are carried off in little pink bags. Two slices of ham are next bought from one of the shops where men in white clothes slice all day long at the lean Prague ham or the fatter Westphalian. No man is really a judge of ham until he has argued for a quarter of an hour every morning outside the shop in the Carlsbad High Street as to what breed of pig gives the most appetising slice. Bag in hand, ham in pocket, the man undergoing a cure walks to the Elephant in the Alte Wiese, or to one of the little restaurants which stud the valley and the hillsides, delightful little buildings with great gla.s.s shelters for rainy days and lawns and flower-beds and creepers, where neat waitresses in black, with their Christian names in white metal worn as a brooch, or great numbers pinned to their shoulders, receive you with laughing welcome, set a red-clothed table for you, and bring you the hot milk and boiled eggs which complete your repast. Be careful of which waitress you smile at on your first day, for she claims you as her especial property for the rest of your stay, and to ask another waitress to bring your eggs would be the deepest treason.

Dinner is a mid-day meal, and as you are not tied down to any particular hotel for your meals because you happen to be staying in it, the custom is to dine where your fancy pleases you. There is Pupp's with its verandah and its little grove of Noah's ark trees, patronised by all nations, and the Golden Shield and Anger's, and Wirchaupt's in the Alte Wiese, which since I have known Carlsbad has grown from a ham shop into a very smart little restaurant handsomely decorated. Wirchaupt's is small enough still for its patrons to have individual attention paid them, and if you are an _habitue_ you will be told as you go in if anything especially good has been bought at market that morning, and little hints are given you as to the composition of your meal. Bohemian partridges and the trout and _Zander_ from the Tepl and other mountain streams are the two great "stand-bys" of the man at Carlsbad who likes good food; but the big fowls which come, I fancy, from Styria, are excellent birds; the venison, the hares, the mutton, and the ever-present ham are all capital. The wines of the country are excellent. The cheapest form of the local wine is served in little _caraffes_, but here, as in most other places, it is wise to pay the extra shilling and drink the bottled wine. Besides the wine of the province there are obtainable the usual Austrian wines, and the Hungarian Erlauer and Offner and Carlowitz.

I have halted in the Alte Wiese to descant on the usual dinner of Carlsbad, which, ordered _a la carte_, never costs more than a few shillings. Up on the hill at the Bristol, from the terrace of which there is a fine view over the valley to the Keilberg, and at the Savoy Westend, where some Egyptian servants imported by Nuncovitch from the land of the Pharoahs wait upon you, and which has a great pavilion as its open-air dining-hall, you are likely to find most of the people, English and American, whose movements are recorded in the society papers, taking their mid-day meal. The American millionaire at Carlsbad, however, fares just as simply and just as cheaply as does any half-pay captain, for Dr. Krauss and Dr. London are no considerers of persons in their dieting.

In the afternoon, about five o'clock, all the world goes to one of the cafes in the valley to listen to a concert and to drink hot milk; and in the evening a meal, as simple as dinner has been, is eaten. This is the hour to see Pupp's at its best. In the little grove of trees before the house, where the big band-stand is, there is an array of tables, each with its lamp upon it. In the outside verandah of the great restaurant there are more tables, and inside the glazed verandah and in two long rooms, each rising a step above the other, are a host of people supping.

The scene is like some great effect at a theatre, and I know nowhere where one can find any restaurant shining with light as Pupp's does on a summer night. The restaurant in the Stadtpark is always crowded when the band plays there, but the attendance is very hurried and casual, and contrasts badly with Pupp's and the other first-cla.s.s restaurants. At the two Variety Theatres in the lower town one can, by booking a table in advance, sup fairly comfortably, and listen while one sups to a very good variety entertainment.

At Gieshubl, where Herr Mattoni makes a fortune by bottling the spring water, and which is little more than an hour's drive from Carlsbad, there is an excellent restaurant where the fare is the same as that found in Carlsbad.

Marienbad

All that I have written of Carlsbad, concerning its food and drink, applies to Marienbad. There is the same freedom as to dining-places, and on a sunny day a man will take his meal in one of the creeper-grown bowers which are erected on the edge of the park by the hotels which face it, or at the Kursaal garden. On a dull day he will dine at Klinger's, the house which has a special celebrity, but which, with its rather stuffy rooms and its much ornamented plate-gla.s.s windows, which never seem to open quite wide enough, is pleasanter on a cool day than a hot one; or at the New York, which has its rooms ornamented after the style the Parisians call "the New Art."

There are several good restaurants in the environs of Marienbad, at the Waldmuhle and elsewhere, and the Egerlander Cafe is well worth a visit.

It is a large cafe, with the usual grove before it, built on a commanding hill. The special characteristics of the place are that the rooms and the great hall are built and furnished after the fashion of Egerland, the most picturesque style that Austria boasts of. The girls who wait are all in the handsome Egerland costume, and the effect is very pretty. There is a restaurant at Egerland, and the proprietor, when I was at Marienbad in 1901, talked of adding sleeping apartments to the establishment and of making it a hotel as well as a restaurant and cafe.

Prague

The expedition to Prague generally forms part of a stay at Carlsbad or Marienbad. My personal experience, gained from two visits, is that if one stays either at the Saxe or the Blauer Stern, it is wiser to take one's meals in the restaurants of the hotels than to go further afield and fare worse. One traverses the hop-fields of Pilsen during the journey from Carlsbad, and an amateur of beer should find Prague a paradise second only to Munich.

Bad Gastein

There are several more or less pretentious hotels in Gastein, but perhaps the most reliable for feeding purposes is the Badeschloss; it is rather old-fashioned, but good of its kind. It was formerly the palace of the Cardinal Bishops. The hot-water springs, discovered in A.D. 680, have their source close to the hotel.

Budapesth

The most distinctive feature of Hungarian cookery is the use of _paprika_, the national pepper. A _Goulache_, as it is usually written on menus, or _Gulyas_ as the Hungarians call it, is a ragout in which the pepper plays an important part. The _Paprikahuhn_ is a chicken stewed or baked with the pepper, which is very pleasant tasting. Pork served with a sharp-tasting _puree_ in which cranberries play a _role_, and other combinations of meat and fruit, brought together very much as we Britons take red current jelly with hare and mutton, are all part of the national cookery. The entrails of animals are used to make some of the dishes; pork, from the innocent sucking pig to the great wild boar, veal, pickled or fresh, and calves lungs in vinegar are all treated as national dishes.

The wines of the country are well known to all Anglo-Saxons for some of them, the red wines, Erlauer, Ofner, and Carlovicz, are exported in great quant.i.ties. The white wines, Ruster, Schomlayer, Szegszarder, and others are equally drinkable, while Tokay is of course a king amongst wines.

Of restaurants in Budapesth there are but few to be recommended to the wanderer. Both the Ungaria and the Koningen von England have restaurants where one can order a dinner which is expensive however simple it may be, and where one may listen to one of those gipsy bands which are now to be found in most of the London restaurants and in some of the Parisian ones. The best restaurant not attached to an hotel is Palkowitch's, the National Casino, which is the "smart" restaurant of the town. A Hungarian gentleman, wishing to give a friend a good dinner, takes him to the Casino Club, and this is the style of meal and wines that he will get. I am not responsible for the spelling of the menu, which is that of the club steward:--

_Somtoi._ | Gulzas Clair.

_Eteville_ 1868. | Fogas de Balaton a la Jean Bart.

_Chateau Margaux_ | Cuissot de Porc frais.

1875. | | Choucroute farcie.

_Moet_ 1884. | Cailles roties sur Canape | Salade.

_Tokay_ 1846. | Artichauts frais. Sauce | Bordelaise.

_Silvorium_ 1796. | Turos Lepeny.

_Baracrkpalinka_ 1860. |

There is a fairly good restaurant near the landing-place on the Margarethen Insel.

N.N.-D.

CHAPTER XII

ROUMANIA

The dishes of the country--The restaurants of Bucarest.

In Roumania you must never be astonished at the items set down in the bill of fare, and if "bear" happens to be one try it, for bruin does not make at all bad eating. The list of game is generally surprisingly large, and one learns in Roumania the difference there is in the venison which comes from the different breeds of deer. Caviar, being the produce of the country, is a splendid dish, and you are always asked which of the three varieties, easily distinguishable by their variety of colour, you will take. A caviar _salade_ is a dish very frequently served. The following are some of the dishes of the country:--_Ciulama_, chicken with a sauce in which flour and b.u.t.ter are used; _Scordolea_, in which crawfish, garlic, minced nuts, and oil all play a part; _Baclava_, a cake of almonds served with _sirop_ of roses. These three dishes, though now Roumanian, were originally introduced from Turkey. _Ardei Ungelute_ is a dish of green pepper, meat, and rice; _Sarmalute_ are vine leaves filled with meat and served with a preparation of milk; _Militei_ is minced beef fried on a grill in the shape of a sausage. _Cheslas_ and _Mamaliguzza_, the food of the peasant, much resemble the Italian _Polenta_ and are eaten with cold milk. _Ghiveci_, a ragout with all kinds of vegetables mixed in it, is a great dish of the country.

Bucarest

When in Bucarest, as it should be spelt, go straight to Capsa's in the Calea Victorici, a first-rate restaurant. It is perhaps not quite equal to the best of the London and Paris establishments, but the cooking is really good, and certainly superior to anything you can find in Vienna.

The French _chef_ will provide you with a _recherche_ dinner ordered _a la carte_. Fresh caviar is in perfection there, as also the sterlet or young sturgeon; the latter is caught in the Danube, and is a most dainty and much prized fish. The prices are fairly high,--about 2 francs 50 centimes for an ordinary _plat_. The wines are all rather expensive, that of the country being perhaps best left alone, although the Dragasani is a wine which tastes strangely at first, but to which one becomes used. A liqueur tasting of carraway seeds is pleasant, but that made from the wild plum is not to be rashly ventured upon.

This is the menu of a little dinner for two eaten at Capsa's:--

Caviar.

Ciorba de Poulet.

Turbot a la Grec.

Mousaka aux Courzes.

Gateaux.