Eating out in Europe: adventures in meat and beer part three - Zurich

If the exchange rate were two Swiss Francs to the pound, Zurich would basically be London with nicer people and a giant lake where Hyde Park should be.The exchange rate is not two Swiss Francs to the pound.At 1.4:1, Zurich feels almost like someone took a modern European city, filled it with bankers, chased out the poor, and installed a really nice tram system to make everyone feel a bit better about it. Funny, that.It's not that I didn't like Zurich - I did. But spending a week feeling poor and inadequately trendy wasn't exactly part of my holiday plan, and we were not lucky with the food. On that, I suppose we've only ourselves to blame. After two weeks away we were both tired of picking restaurants, much less the actual menu choices, and by the time we reached Switzerland, basically all I wanted to do was pack myself with cheese to the point of rupture.Spoilers: nothing ruptured, but dried plums work surprisingly well in a cordon bleu.

Zeughauskeller

It's big, it's brash, it's in the guidebooks, it's built in a converted armoury, and it's all about the sausages. Well-wurst in them, if you will. Zeughauskeller was probably the busiest restaurant I've been to, and although it's far from the best I'd happily recommend eating there if you're in Zurich.I ate an Engadine spiced beef and pork sausage, served with a bulkier and less interesting take on the standard potato salad.All around us though, waiters bustled with trays and trolleys heaped high with sausages, including one a metre or so long, served on a kind of sword. There's a bit of theatre to the place, and I found myself enjoying the lively atmosphere, not minding sharing a table, and wanting to return to tick off more sausages.[gallery link="file" ids="1366,1365,1361"]GertrudhofGertrudhof has a light alpine theme and serves almost exclusively cordon bleus. Yes, it's not a Swiss dish, but the Swiss have embraced it hard. After all, it's fried meat with melted cheese.Gertrudhof was the best meal I had in Zurich, piss-taking pricing notwithstanding. I ate a pork cordon bleu with dried plums. The ham was Tyrolean bauernspeck, and the cheese a rich raclette. Kit chose one with ham, a little onion, raclette, and bonus smoked ham. Although his was richer, I found the plum a little more interesting. That bit of acid and sweetness goes through the cheesiness just so, and to be honest, with yet more rosti on token fruit and veg was  a matter of urgency.

Ban Song Thai

I'm not going to dwell on this, but Ban Song Thai did serve me the best red Thai curry I've eaten, and it was amazing to get a bit of variety into the mix by this point in the trip.It's down a side street near the Grossmünster - easy enough to find, if perhaps not the most obvious place for a Thai restaurant. It was also incredibly busy. We were lucky to get our table, given the density of bookings, and the staff were fantastic.It's a short walk from the Kunsthaus art museum, so if like us you're in Zurich, tired, and fatigued by both fried meat and early Modernism, stop in and eat Thai curry.

Johanniter

Do not, by contrast, stop in to Johanninter. Oh, it's possible they were having a bad night - the issue with our order (starters and mains arriving at once) felt like bad luck rather than institutional incompetence, and they were lovely about it. But the food still wasn't good.It's basically a less interesting, more touristy, and seemingly somewhat understaffed Zeughauskeller. Johanniter occupies an old townhouse that was apparently a kind of brew pub in the eighteen-hundreds. All that remains of that is an achingly posed set of archaic brewing artefacts decorating a mediocre restaurant. Their liver and gravy specialty was lifeless and flat (and lukewarm), and the only real redeeming moment was the starter of raclette with pickles.It does have lots of atmosphere, opening onto a thronged street on a busy Saturday ensured that.evening. If Kit's veal sausage had been even slightly more interesting than the liver, I'd consider giving it another chance on hopefully a better night. But the whole experience was so thoroughly drab I just can't face it. I do feel terrible for the lady waiting our table, however. She was clearly having a miserable night, and I don't know how she managed not to knife someone.As you can probably see, Zurich was far and away our least fortunate food city, and we made some poor choices. I genuinely liked Zeughauskeller, but between exchange rates and tourist popularity pricing, it's taking the piss. Gertrudhof was broadly similar, and I'd be enthusing about it if they'd had a couple of little things like a (small) wine list, and vegetables. I was going to add that the service was great everywhere we went, but Johanniter rather blotted that copy book, so I'll settle for "extraordinarily friendly and helpful". This at least remained true even in the case that found us waiting half an hour to get the bill for an indifferent, room-temperature meal.

A wrap-up, and the obligatory list

Broadly, we ate fantastic food in central Europe. We did this by front-loading the research, rather than trying to pick restaurants opportunistically, or trawl through TripAdvisor (with its attendant review quality perils) while tired, hungry, and cranky at the end of the day. We still fucked up a few times, but hey - it was better than any other trip I've been on.It's kind of fallacious to compare everywhere we ate, given the only contextually sensible set they're usefully part of is "places you can eat if you take the exact same holiday as us". But I've ranked them anyway because it' kind of fun:

1. Zwickl
2. Finkh
3. 5 Senes (grudgingly, on objective food quality)
4. Ban Song Thai
5. Haxnbauer
6. Grano
7. Gertrudhof
8. 7 Stern Brau
9. Zeughauskeller

10. Bärenwirt

11. Johanniter
12. (That fucking place in Lindau I didn't review with the worst Schnitzel you can imagine)

For the rest of the restaurants, see:

• Part one - Vienna
• Part two - Salzburg and Munich