Hello, my lovelies. It's been a quiet, and somewhat disheartening, start to the year, and so I've not had much to say thus far. However. I suspect the next few months will be quite busy, so it's time to do a little catching up on the handful of things that have happened since last we spoke. Starting waaay back in December, when we got stuck in Munich (after both a flight cancellation and a major delay, which made us miss our connecting transatlantic flight) for a night on our way home for Christmas. And while all of the hassle was irritating, I can say that there are certainly worse places to be stuck for a night, especially during the holiday season. We started our evening with a quick stop at the Christmas market on Marienplatz (home of Munich's city hall) for some glühwein and a ridiculously tasty fried apple rings...
Pretty!
These are every bit as tasty as you'd imagine.
...then headed to the Residenz, the seat of Munich's government from 1508 through 1918. The place was mostly destroyed during WWII, but was carefully reconstructed afterwards. It's not so much to look at from the outside, but the inside is something else. Currently, 130 rooms are open to the public, but a few of them stand out; for example, the massive Antiquarium, built in the 16th century to house the antiquities collection of Duke Albrecht V.
Detail of that ceiling.
I loved this stove in one of the bedrooms because it reminded me of soft-serve.
Extra-fancy hallway...
...leading to the 18th-century Ornate Rooms. (This one's the Green Gallery.)
Cabinet of Mirrors. All of those wee blue things on the walls are these tiny little vases, each on its own tiny little shelf. (Gahhhhhh, tiny things on tiny shelves! Cannot deal! I want a room like this in my apartment, please and thank you.)
Sadly, we didn't get to the Residenz early enough to visit both the palace and its treasury (...next time!!), so we headed back out to the Christmas market to frolic for a while. It was brutally cold outside, but at least it was pretty.
For dinner, we ended up at Zum Dürnbräu again, which was fine by me. That place is cozy and friendly and has the kind of good, warm, hearty food that one needs in those temperatures.* Next morning, we finally made our flight to the US, and had a lovely visit with our families for Christmas.
Then, back to Zürich, for a lot of good food and fantastic music. First up, a dairy-themed pop-up called Chalait (ha, ha), where we shared cheese curds with bacon-dashi and winter cabbage; burrata sorbet with quince, parsnip, and gin; trout with potatoes and buttermilk; a wee little brioche roll filled with fondue; beef with chervil root and kefir; and a plate of alpine cheese with apples. Really a nice meal, and with friendly, efficient service to boot.
Bonus take-away: the back of the Chalait menu contained what I've dubbed a "cheese map." We kept it, 'cause cheese is basically my favorite thing in all the world.
Next came dinner and a concert at Herzbaracke, which, as we all know, is my favorite place in wintertime Zürich. (Maybe just in Zürich, period, time of year notwithstanding. It is pretty special.) We saw Marco Marchi for the third time in as many years, and as always, they put on a bang-up show. Their music is sorta a mishmash of blues and ragtime and Dixieland jazz, and I absolutely love them.
Here, their splendid cover of a Rolling Stones classic.
Then, another pop-up, this time at a really interesting venue: Die Stadthalle, which was originally built as one of the largest public event venues in the country, and once hosted theater, sporting, and political events for the working class (and even a few--dare we say it--socialists) until it met its ignominious end in the 1940s, when it was turned into a parking garage. It continued to function as such until 2016, when the building was sold**, after which point some rather industrious, and quite talented, chefs--including Valentin Diem, the guy behind the always-excellent Wood Food events--took the place over and made it into a surprisingly cozy dinner venue. (Our table, FYI, was positioned right over a Hertz parking spot.)
And ohhhhh, the food...
And ohhhhh, the food...
Man, do we love ourselves a good tasting menu. Menu translation, with a few notes: that's salmon with avocado, Granny Smith apples, and dill; perfectly-roasted cauliflower with an egg-yolk spread; little lettuce wraps with pork, peanuts, and radishes; roasted flower sprouts with mustard, bacon, and burrata; giant shrimp with edamame, Thai basil, and sesame; beef, lentils, and some small-diced veggies with chimichurri sauce; a poached egg with sweet potato and leeks; and for dessert, a "table bomb." Which, in real life, is a tall, cylindrical, cardboard party-popper containing all manner of festive little toys, paper masks, whistles, horns, clown noses, fake mustaches, party hats, etc., that one usually breaks out for New Year's Eve.
This version, however, was a gold-dusted, spherical, dark chocolate shell that our waitress dropped onto our plastic-covered tabletop with a good bit of flair, purely for the splatter effect. Inside that thing were the sourest of sour cherry sorbets; a dollop of quark; tiny pink and white candies somewhere between Pop Rocks and Nerds; yellow meringue crumbles; a bit of crumbled blondie; and sour cherries aged in balsamic vinegar. The waitress drizzled some sour cherry-balsamic sauce over the whole thing, and she left that sauce for us to use at our discretion. People, this may have been the best dessert I've ever had, not just for its theatricality, which was excellent, but for the sour cherry/dark chocolate combination, which is the absolute pinnacle of desserty flavors for me. (Long after we'd finished the insidey goodness, I kept using bits of the shell like a spoon for more of that sauce. Couldn't stop eating it.)
I don't normally have much to say about the settings of pop-ups--they're usually cozy and clever, but nothing too remarkable--but I've gotta say, here, the event planners really did an amazing job. They'd set up a trendy little elevated bar at the rear of the room, and an attractive open kitchen at the front. Their vertical fabric panels and pendant lights made the space cozy, chic, and surprisingly intimate, and they'd even made all sorts of clever little nods to the garage itself (e.g., bar seats made of tires; roller-painted "tire tracks" along the bases of the walls; and all of the table numbers were marked on tiny toy cars). Heat-wise, I was a little concerned, seeing as how it is a parking garage and all, but they'd draped several layers of thick velvet curtains over the entrance to the garage, and had plenty of subtle heaters placed around the room, so it was surprisingly warm in there. And, at the end of the evening, when we picked up our coats from the check, we found that they'd put handwarmers in our pockets. (At that moment in time, these were my favorite people on earth.)
Hee.
In February, we decided to try out Raw by Michael Adams, a Japanese/Peruvian fusion pop-up, and holy cow. Was that an excellent meal. And gorgeous, too!
Because we have little-to-no self control at these sorts of events, we opted for the (slightly) smaller of the two tasting menus on offer. Here's the full run-down: gyoza with sweet potato puree; baby spinach salad with green apples and yuzu truffle dressing (best. salad. ever!!!); Japanese cucumber salad topped with vinegar and sesame; kingfish sashimi with tomatoes, purple potatoes, and more of that divine yuzu truffle sauce (pictured above);
this gorgeous sushi plate;
crispy pork belly with fresh tomato salsa on smoked blue potato puree (front); miso-marinated chicken with teriyaki and paperthin root vegetable salad (rear);
and crispy seabass filet with aji amarillo salsa and sweet potato puree.
We had dessert, too, but the shining stars were everything that came before. In fact...we liked it so much that we went back a second time in March and had the beef menu instead of the fish, which included all of the above, but swapped in beef tataki, a perfectly-cooked-octopus and watercress salad with some sort of spicy/adobo-like/vinegary sauce (yummmmmmmm!!), and beef filet for the gyoza, pork belly, and seabass. Genuinely spectacular food. (Just found out they extended the pop-up through April, and I kinda want to go back.)
In mid-February came another show at Herzbaracke, this one by the fantastic little Salonorchester Odeon, whose music was gorgeous and lively and humorous and reminded me of the soundtrack to an (unspecified) old movie. Personally, I enjoyed it so much that I'd kinda like it to be the soundtrack to my everyday.
Plus, they played a few of these wondrous songs that would get faster and faster and faster and they all still, somehow, miraculously, kept playing in unison. (Um...they were much better in tune, too, than the video from my phone would have you believe.)
And finally, in early March, our last Herzbaracke outing for the year, and a show about which I was really excited: the Red Hot Serenaders Orchestra. The Red Hot Serenaders are a male-female, vocals-and-stringed-instruments duo (he on various vintage guitars, she on various vintage ukuleles and mandolins) who teamed up with a clarinet-and-piano player; a trombone-harmonica-accordion (and almost literally everything else) player; a sousaphone-and-upright-bass player; and--yessss--a washboard player to form a blues/ragtime/jazz/swing supergroup. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.
I'm somewhat annoyed by these people who can play such different instruments at such a high level on both. That's an overabundance of talent, people, and it'd be nice if they could possibly donate just a smidge to those of us with zero musical talent at all. Sigh.
Ughhhh, just listen to that piano. And who doesn't love a good washboard? But really, the trombone-harmonica-accordion guy may have kinda stole the show. He was absolutely no slouch on the trombone, accordion, or harmonica, but then this happened:
he played a plastic bag.
He played a garden hose, onto which he'd stuck a trombone mouthpiece.
He played a ginormous watering can (also with mouthpiece).
He finished with a wine bottle. No mouthpiece this time; the top of the bottle apparently sufficed.
After Herzbaracke pulled up stakes and sailed back to Rapperswil for the end of its season (sigh), we headed to Oensingen for a night to catch the spectacular, only-every-third-year, fireworks sensation that is Sonnwendfeier.
As luck would have it (...if you will...), that particular day was St. Patrick's Day, and there was the Six Nations, Ireland-England rugby match on TV, so naturally, we started the afternoon with green cider in an Irish pub in Solothurn.
The Irish beat the English to win a grand slam (i.e., they went undefeated in the tourney), and we headed out into the cold, steady rain in the hopes that the fireworks would still happen. And they did. But the weather was a perfect storm (well, really, lack thereof...) of low-hanging clouds and no wind, which meant that, with the exception of the first volley of fireworks (which was amazing! it was done entirely in rainbow sequence!), everything was behind the clouds. Which trapped all the smoke. Oh sure, you could still see the light from each explosion, and the vague colors contained therein, and everyone kept hoping that the increasing smoke would dissipate, but alas, no such luck. We left just at the beginning of the grand finale, the noise and duration of which was impressive, but its near-invisibility, not so much. On to 2021, I guess. And at least there's Züri Fäscht next summer. (I just feel really, really bad for the two clubs that spent three years, and insane amounts of money, purchasing and choreographing what should have been a righteous fireworks spectacle, and they got hit with the rottenest imaginable weather for fireworks. Tough, tough break, VCO and RCO. We love you anyway!)
After that--and just this week, actually!--we had one more pop-up to visit. The lovely people from Zampano (one of whose events we'd attended in 2016) teamed up with the restaurant Basta (in Tel Aviv) to bring us this final round of excellent (and quite interesting) food in a really tastefully-decorated, shabby-chic warehouse setting. (There seem to be no end of those spaces in this city, nor of people who can see the potential there and can create a creative, welcoming ambiance. I'm always impressed by it.)
I'm sure they probably just go to the Brocki and buy a bunch of mismatched place settings and tables/chairs, but it always works. I'm sure if I tried this at home, it'd look even more like a flea market in my apartment than it already does. (Design is not not not one of my areas of expertise.)
Anyway, food! The first "course," served tapas-style. In this round were grilled oysters topped with some sort of ridiculously melty, salty, awesome cheese; hummus mesabacha (with root veggies and almonds); lentil salad with coriander, mint, yogurt, and sauteed onions; chicken bruschetta; baked fennel with Alp cheese and mint; spicy sweet potato puree (which, apparently, had a touch of anchovy in it, just for an extra kick of flavor, and man, was it good!); cuttlefish salad with onions, peppers, and radishes (also spicy); and this amazing, spicy, vinegary tomato salad with coriander, onions, crunchy fried pita bread, a touch of feta, and, I think, maybe a tad of lemon juice. Sooooo good. I will dream of that salad.
Sadly, after that, our evening went rather downhill. We'd reserved for 7:00, and the first round came in a reasonably quick amount of time, but when we finished it, we had to wait until everyone in the place had been served their first round, too. This included people who'd shown up after 8:30. So we sat, and sat, and sat, and sat, and waited, and waited, and waited. I'm sure the rest of the food was great, too, but by that time we were both a bit disenchanted by the whole process, and so we kinda plowed through the rest in a grumbly fog. The remainder included baked Savoy cabbage in rice cream; clams with a sort-of pesto-like sauce and black rice; lamb neck over smoked grains of some sort; and these spicy, chunky, apparently North African-style balls of fish served with chickpeas and roasted peppers. Actually, it was all quite good, but the highlight was when they asked if we wanted more of any of the first round, so I got me some more sweet potatoes and tomato salad. It was a loooooooooooong and somewhat irritating evening, but at least the company was good, our bottle of rosé prosecco was tremendous, and the food was quite tasty (and some of it actually spicy--a true rarity in these parts).
Ooh, and apropos of nothing: because people get weird about Easter around here, I bring you these tidbits.
Yeah, that's a local bakery advertising a bitcoin chocolate bunny. (Wha...?)
The next week, it was an Ed Sheeran bunny. (Just...why??? I don't know whether these sandwich boards were just to bring people into the store, or whether you could actually purchase these particular chocolate bunnies, but I certainly didn't care enough to find out.)
Mike spotted this one: BUNNEH SMART CAR. Now that's funny.
And on that note, it's on to the next: a long weekend in Rome, both to save Mike money on his travel to the US, and to keep me from losing my mind in this long, gray, freezing cold Zürich winter. (The success of the latter is, of course, debatable.)
*Yes, I'm still complaining about the weather, even as we approach April, because it's been winter here since the beginning of November, and it's showing very few signs of letting up. I feel like I've been cold for years.
**Interestingly enough--at least for a history/architecture nerd such as myself--the building was sold to Switzerland Tourism, who intend to remove most of the two levels of concrete floors inserted during the garage build-out, so that the interior has something of its original open layout again. Neat.
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