AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY
Viennese restaurants and
cafés--Baden--Carlsbad--Marienbad--Prague--Bad Gastein--Budapesth.
Vienna
The cuisine of the best of the Viennese restaurants, those attached to
the big hotels, is French, though the Wiener Rostbraten and the Wiener
Schnitzel are world-famous, and the typical Viennese dinner is a good
French dinner with the addition of very delicious bread and pastry made
with a lighter hand than any Gallic cook brings to his task. The wines
of the country of Retz, Mailberg, Pfaffstadt, Gumpoldskirchen,
Klosterneuberg, Nussberg, and Vöslau should all be tasted, most of them
being more than drinkable. Beer, however, is the real Viennese drink,
and the very light liquid, ice cold, is a delightful beverage.
"Stay at what hotel you please, but dine at the Bristol," was the advice
given me nigh a score of years ago when I first visited Vienna, and it
holds good now; indeed of late the "smart set" of Vienna has taken it
greatly into favour, and dines or sups there--the opera and plays begin
at 7 and end at 10--constantly. The prices, _à la carte_, are high, but
the cooking is good. Some specialities of the house are trout taken
alive from the aquarium, _Huitres Titania_, _Homard Cardinal_, _Poularde
Wladimir_, _Soufflé King Edward VII._, _Oranges à l'Infante_.
Sacher's, in the hotel of that name just behind the Opera House, is very
well known and may be taken as the typical Viennese restaurant. It is
expensive, as indeed all the best Viennese restaurants are. It is not
quite so exclusively French in its cuisine as some of the other good
restaurants, and one of its _plats de jour_ is always a national dish,
as often as not a Hungarian one, so that by dining or breakfasting at
Sacher's one obtains some idea of what the real cookery of the dual
monarchy is like. Sacher's has a branch establishment in the Prater,
which is always in high favour with the Viennese.
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
Kärnthenerstrass, and for that at the Reidhof.
The Stephan Keller (Café de l'Europe) in the Stephan Platz is a much
frequented café. 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 classes
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 butterfly cafés opening in the summer and closing in the
winter, and if their _clientèle_ 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
Lusthaus, which are made the turning-points in the daily drives of the
Viennese.
Vienna keeps very early hours, the cafés closing well before midnight,
unless they are kept open for some special _fête_.
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
Weilburggasse, and the walk up the valley of the Schwechat has
café-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 glassfuls 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 glass 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 _habitué_ 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 _à 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
cafés 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-class 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 Gieshübl, 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-glass 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
Waldmühle and elsewhere, and the Egerländer Café is well worth a visit.
It is a large café, 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
café.
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 _purée_ in which cranberries play a _rolé_,
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 quantities. 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 à la Jean Bart.
_Château Margaux_ | Cuissot de Porc frais.
1875. |
| Choucroute farcie.
_Moet_ 1884. | Cailles rôties sur Canapé
| 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.