Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  Just then, the server brings Michael a plate of schafkase im mantel—sheep’s milk cheese wrapped in speck. What, no backhenderl? “It’s delicious, but no. I had it for lunch yesterday,” Michael says, sheepishly. “And the day before.”

  Since he opened Wallse, his Michelin-starred homage to Viennese cuisine, in the West Village in 2000, Kurt Gutenbrunner has been turning Manhattanites on to schnitzel, spaetzle and gruner veltliner. He’s the primary advocate and most recognized representative of Austrian food culture in America, and in Austria, a country with a population about the same size as New York City’s, he’s something of a local hero. For six days, Kurt and I scoured the country in search of new ingredients, producers and dishes that will inspire his menus in the year to come at Wallse and his other restaurants: Blaue Gans, the Austrian bistro in TriBeCa; Café Sabarsky, the Viennese café at the Neue Gallerie; Café Kristall, at the Swarovski Building; and his wine bar, the Upholstery Shop. To kick off the week, we meet at Plachutta, one of Vienna’s most respected traditional restaurants, for a crash course in Austrian Cuisine 101.

  Looking at the menu, Kurt explains how Austria has always been a crossroads, a place in the middle. Once the seat of power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was also the easternmost city in Western Europe during the Cold War. Centuries of trade, diplomacy and conquest have left their mark on the city’s cuisine. “Gulasch? From the Hungarians,” explains Kurt. “Schnitzel, that’s essentially a Milanese, from Italy. A lot of these pastries are Czech. And the coffee in our famous cafés? From the Turks.”

  But since the end of the Empire, the major influence on Austrian cuisine has come from within. In the early 20th century, Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner provided the philosophical underpinnings for what would become the organic farming movement.

  Naturally, Austria has become one of the world’s leaders in organic farming; it was one of the first countries to set official organic guidelines, and its government continues to subsidize ecological farming practices. As a result, close to 20 percent of its farms are organic, more that in any other European country (except tiny Liechtenstein).

  From the hippest Viennese nightspot to the most rustic small-town gasthaus, we see these two forces working in harmony, and they define contemporary Austrian cuisine—traditional dishes, like Wiener schnitzel and krautsalat, are thoughtfully prepared so that the flavors of the fresh, local meat and produce shine through. Kurt is tickled by the recent rise of Austrian cuisine in New York’s dining scene, where Midtown’s Seasonal now has a Michelin star, and dozens of beer gardens have sprouted up over the past 10 years.

  “When I put tafelspitz on the menu in New York, people said, ‘You’re serving us boiled beef?’ It wasn’t very cool,” Kurt says. Plachutta is famous for this quintessential Austrian dish, which is essentially a simple boiled dinner; the name refers to the cut of beef, which comes from the round. Other cuts—kavalierspitz, tafelstück and so forth—are commonly used, but “tafelspitz in particular is accompanied by a myriad of legends, and no other dish has a comparable historic significance,” according to the Plachutta cookbook. The service is warm and formal; the food, simple and hearty as corned beef and cabbage. Kurt serves kavalierspitz at Blaue Gans, his casual Austrian bistro in TriBeCa. Does he lighten it up a bit for his downtown Manhattan crowd? “No, of course not,” he says, between forkfuls of beef. “Does the Viennese Philharmonic play Mozart any differently when they come to New York?”

  After getting through almost a pound of beef, I put my fork down, while Kurt continues to eat. He is a man of voracious appetites and seemingly boundless energy—it’s no wonder at all that his little hometown of Wallsee, a little village in Upper Austria, couldn’t hold him.

  In 1988, after a two-year stint at Munich’s then-Michelin-Three-Star restaurant Tantris, he was introduced to Hermann Reiner, chef of Windows on the World in New York, who hired his 26-year-old fellow Austrian as sous chef. Gutenbrunner fell in love with New York, but found the experience of cooking at the top of the World Trade Center disconcerting. “I was used to buying produce off a truck in back of the restaurant; now, we were buying produce 110 floors below. It was like working on a submarine,” Kurt says.

  In the meantime, an American chef with ties to Austria and impeccable French training was earning rave reviews in TriBeCa; before opening his eponymous restaurant, David Bouley had worked at the then four-star restaurant Vienna 79 with chef Peter Grunauer. In 1990, Gutenbrunner found his first real home in the States in the kitchen at Bouley, and started a working relationship with chef David Bouley that would last, off and on, for 10 years. The restaurant Bouley has become a proving ground for American chefs—Eric Ripert, Dan Barber and César Ramirez all passed through in the 1990s, to name a few. Gutenbrunner was suitably challenged and invigorated by the other chefs in the kitchen. “We were a great team. No one could beat us. It was a shitload of work, and there was a lot of pressure, but when people push each other like that, a lot of extreme things can happen,” Kurt says, before turning wistful. “I think if things happened on schedule, David and I would still be working together.”

  “What are you doing, Johnny?” Kurt asks, gesturing at my half-full plate as he scoops the last bites of kavalierspitz from his own. At our first meeting, Kurt started calling me Johnny, and after a couple of days, I stopped correcting him. I told Kurt I was stuffed; I probably should have passed on the chanterelle omelet that we had as an appetizer. “What’s the matter? You only ate half a cow,” he says. “Let’s get dessert.”

  When we meet early the next morning, we have dessert again. “I love cake,” Kurt tells me as he quickly demolishes a slice of Landtmann torte, with its decadent layers of walnut cream and marzipan. Vienna’s cafés are justly famous for their extravagant cakes—like sachertorte, linzertorte and apfelstrudel, to name a few—and during our week in Austria, Kurt never misses a dessert. His trim silhouette can only be explained by his inexhaustible energy and outright speed; I often have to jog to keep up with him as he navigates the twisting streets of Vienna like he’s being chased. He only stops to eat, as he is now, at Café Landtmann, a fabled Viennese café a stone’s throw from Vienna’s University, the City Hall and the monumental Burgtheater.

  An hour later, we stumble onto a frozen yogurt shop called “Kurt” on a cobblestone street; Kurt warmly greets the owners (“You’re Kurt? I’m Kurt!”), drops business cards on all of the shop’s patrons and orders a blueberry-acai yogurt, in the “Classic Kurt” size. “Once, I went to Café Sabarsky for a business meeting, and I ate four apricot cakes before it was over,” he says. Kurt opened Café Sabarsky in the Neue Gallerie, Manhattan’s museum of Austrian and German art and design, in 2001. Kurt had met the museum’s founder, Ronald Lauder, when they both ordered Thonet chairs from the same Austrian company. After visiting Vienna, the likeness of Café Sabarsky to its Viennese cousins is almost eerie—from the waiters’ uniforms to the Thonet hat racks to the menu, with its Staud’s jams and sachertortes and grosser brauner (coffee with steamed milk), it’s all the same.

  Gutenbrunner comes to Austria several times a year, in part to see old friends and family, and in part to source new ingredients for his New York kitchens. This is what has brought us to Heimschuh, a sleepy town in the southern state of Styria, near the Slovenian border. It’s home to the Hartlieb mill, where some of the world’s best pumpkinseed oil is pressed. “This was once oil of the poor,” says Thomas Hartlieb, whose great-grandfather opened the Hartlieb mill in 1896, when they used river power to mill lumber as well as grain. “People thought it was low quality, because of its dark color.” In the bottle, pumpkinseed oil is a dark, almost purplish green; when Hartlieb holds a bottle high and pours it so that the afternoon sun shines through the oil, it’s a vivid crimson. Now, it is to Austria what EVOO is to Italy; in a week, I think I had it at every meal, dressing greens, tomatoes, cheese and fish with its distinctive nutty flavor.

  Hartlieb keeps a collection of antique pumpkinseed presses in
a makeshift museum on the mill’s second floor, but on the ground floor, high-tech presses and grinders do the work today. Local farmers grow special Styrian “oil pumpkins,” whose seeds grow without hulls. This squash’s harvest is the inversion of its American cousins: they keep the seeds and discard the flesh. At Hartlieb, those prized seeds are ground and roasted, which causes the proteins in the seed puree to separate from the oil. That mixture is pressed, the oil collected, and what’s left behind—a protein-rich puck of pressed pumpkinseeds—becomes livestock feed on nearby farms.

  Over a seidel of Puntigamer, the go-to lager in Styria, at the café across the street, Gutenbrunner and Hartlieb talk about pumpkinseed oil’s appearance on the gourmet food scene; until about 20 years ago, it wasn’t even common in upper Austria, though it’s been used in Styria for centuries. “It wasn’t that we didn’t want it; you Styrian guys just didn’t want to give it to us,” says Kurt. It’s an ingredient Kurt has always showcased to great effect. Ruth Reichl, in typical for-mature-audiences-only prose, reviewed Gutenbrunner’s food when he was chef at the Monkey Bar, a clubbish Midtown restaurant then owned by steakhouse czar Peter Glazier, in the New York Times in 1998: “Just take a spoonful of his butternut squash soup. Hold it in your mouth, rejoicing in the deep richness of the pumpkinseed oil on top. . . . It is irresistible.”

  Eight years earlier, when his first son was born, Kurt had left Bouley and moved to Germany—he thought Europe would be a better place to raise a family—but returned to New York to work with his old boss whenever time allowed. In 1996, he moved to New York for good and hatched plans with Bouley to open the Austrian restaurant that would become Danube. But plans stalled, Kurt became impatient and steakhouse czar Glazier made Kurt an offer he couldn’t refuse—his first executive chef gig, at Monkey Bar. “He gave me everything and beyond. I didn’t want to do it at first, but it’s hard to see everyone else moving ahead when you’re standing still,” Kurt says. After two years there, he met the investors who would help him fund Wallse—parents of a kid on his son’s soccer team—and a restaurant empire was born.

  From the roof of the Gegenbauer vinegar factory, we can see the broken roof tiles of the surrounding apartment blocks in this unglamorous neighborhood of Vienna’s 10th district. We’ve come to check in on an old friend of Kurt’s, Erwin Gegenbauer, whose grandfather Ignaz started making sauerkraut and pickled vegetables in this building in 1929. In the 1990s, Erwin sold off most of the company’s assets to focus on his true aspiration: to make the world’s best fruit vinegars. Gegenbauer makes vinegars from every kind of foodstuff imaginable: apples and grapes, but also honey, figs, cucumbers and asparagus. These are not the vinegars on your typical grocery shelf, flavored with raspberries or other fruit. “Those vinegars are made by adding fruit flavors to wine vinegar. That is chemistry, and I don’t do that,” Gegenbauer says, in near-perfect English. “My raspberry vinegar is all raspberries, no other ingredients. You could say it’s more simple this way. But the simplest products can be the most complicated.”

  Gegenbauer starts his process by working with local farmers, selecting fruit with the careful attention of a winemaker. “How many leaves per branch is optimal? When do we harvest? How do we press the fruit to get the juice? These are the questions we ask,” he says. The fruit juice is allowed to ferment, creating a wine; Gegenbauer then introduces specific strains of bacteria—he keeps several hundred on hand—which will, over several weeks, convert the alcohol in the wine to acid, creating vinegar. Some vinegars are then aged in oak wine barrels, either in his cellar or on his roof, exposed to the elements. I ask why there’s no tradition of making this kind of vinegar in Austria, or anywhere else. “There’s a popular perception that vinegar must be cheap, that vinegar is wine that’s gone bad,” Gegenbauer says. “That’s changing.”

  Gegenbauer brings out his newest project to show Kurt, an oil made from pressed raspberry seeds—a by-product of his vinegar process. “I love working with Kurt,” Gegenbauer says. “I give him vinegar, we taste it and discuss. Sometimes I work with him in the kitchen, and together we create a new dish. I’m the craftsman; he’s the creative, pushing me to experiment with new flavors.”

  He places a few drops on the back of Kurt’s hand and mine; Kurt licks it off and stares at Gegenbauer as he rolls it around in his mouth. The flavor is subtle and woody at first, then slowly blossoms into something like raspberry jam on toast. “The berry flavor comes late,” Kurt says.

  “But it stays a long time,” Gegenbauer says. “That’s amazing! Can I take this with me?” Kurt says. Our hands will smell, pleasantly, like raspberry bushes for the rest of the day.

  A photographer from an Austrian society magazine arrives; she asks the two men to pose between the batteries of casks on the roof. Gutenbrunner is totally relaxed in front of a camera, posing for pictures like an aging rock star, to which he sometimes compares himself (“You know what they say about British rock and rollers? They don’t fucking die! Keith Richards. Robert Plant. I’m like that. You can’t kill me.”). His body totally relaxed, Kurt looks directly into the camera, eyelids heavy, his lips slightly curled in the suggestion of a smile.

  “Let’s go see Claus, Johnny,” Kurt says. The open fields of Burgenland, planted with chest-high cornstalks and sunflowers, whip past the windows of our Mini Countryman, as Kurt drops gears to pass another ambling truck. “You’ll like this guy. He’s a little crazy.”

  Claus Preisinger’s winery is a strikingly modern poured-concrete bunker filled with strikingly low-tech equipment—just a bunch of stainless steel tanks and wooden barrels. There’s not even a pump in sight—when Preisinger needs to move his wine from tank to barrel, he uses a length of tubing to siphon it, concerned that mechanical pumping will disturb his wines. In the corner, there’s a stack of crates of mineral water (“Good for breakfast,” Preisinger says.) and Budweiser Budvar (“Very important after a day in the vineyards: cold beer.”) and, off to the side, the winery’s most advanced piece of machinery: a 500-liter teapot, where he makes chamomile tea to feed his vines during times of stress. He hasn’t used pesticides or herbicides in years and cites Rudolf Steiner as a direct influence.

  Kurt includes a wide swath of Austrian winemakers on the lists at his New York restaurants, from the most traditional old houses to the newest, most cutting-edge vintners, like Preisinger. With the tousled good looks of an emo rocker, Preisinger is, at 31, the youngest member of Pannobile, a group of nine local winemakers who have banded together to form their own appellation—like a French AOC, which controls what grapes can be used in what wines, but without the government. Each year, the winemakers in the group submit their wines to a tasting panel of their peers; to be considered a Pannobile wine, all nine winemakers must unanimously approve.

  He pours his 2008 Pannobile, a blend of zweigelt, blaufränkisch and a little bit of St. Laurent, a rare, highly aromatic grape. “It’s tricky to grow,” says Preisinger, “but sometimes the trickiest grapes make the best wines.” It’s lovely stuff, light-bodied and subtle, with flavors of black currant and earth. As we drink, watching the sun set over Lake Neuseidl into a bank of clouds, a burly farmer with mud-spattered boots walks in—it’s Paul Achs, another Pannobile winemaker, carrying a bottle of his 2000 blaufränkisch, and the glasses are filled again. The two winemakers are eager to take him out to dinner, to a restaurant called Blaue Gans—the same as Kurt’s TriBeCa bistro. But Kurt begs off, and we get back on the road. “I know these guys,” says Kurt. “We go out with them to dinner and it’ll be sunrise before we get to our hotel.”

  Erich Stekovics, with his round red cheeks, deep-set eyes and red polo shirt covering a round belly, fits his nickname: Kaiser der Paradeiser (the emperor of tomatoes). In the fertile plains of Burgenland, he raises more than 800 varieties of tomatoes every year; in his stores, he keeps the seeds for 2,000 more. “I think he named one of his daughters Tomato,” Kurt whispers, as we follow Stekovics into his greenhouses.

  As we stalk quick
ly through rows of six-foot plants heavy with fruit, he pulls tomatoes off the vines for us to taste. With his knife, he splits a small, dark tomato and shows us the purplish flesh. “Black cherry,” he says, before popping half in his mouth and motioning for me to do the same. The flesh is lush and flavorful; the juice is thick and heady, like a swig of Achs’s blaufränkisch. The tomatoes follow in quick succession, and Stekovics rattles off the names; he can identify hundreds of varieties by sight. There’s de Barao, yellow and plum-shaped; Russian pear, sweet and smooth, as fragrant as a ripe peach; vibrant red Schlessian raspberry—each more flavorful and succulent than the one before.

  His secret? He doesn’t water his plants. Ever. Bred for hardiness, they’re forced to sink their roots ever deeper into the earth, giving them greater access to resources and, he believes, producing the world’s most flavorful tomatoes. His methods buck conventional wisdom, which dictates that tomatoes need plenty of water, and baffle experts; a research team from the University of Innsbruck took three days to excavate the root-ball of one of his plants. Home gardeners from all over Europe visit to see Stekovics’s plants and hear his gospel—but their hearts are not strong enough to follow him. “They’re afraid,” he says, obviously a little hurt. “They go home and water their plants.”

  As Kurt tries to convince Stekovics to visit the U.S. (“I want to introduce you to some of my farmers,” he says), Stekovics brings us to one of his favorite plants: the Firework tomato, a Russian variety that’s 450 years old, its carmine flesh streaked with the yellow and gold flecks that give it its name. As he cuts into it, red juice drips down his hand; the flesh is dark red to its core. It’s just delicious, fruity and aromatic, like summer savory and wildflowers, the Platonic ideal of a tomato. “You want a restaurant?” Stekovics shouts, flourishing the knife in his seed-stained hand. “Bring your table in here. I’ll make you a feast you won’t forget. Seven courses of tomatoes.” He leans in close, and fixes his hound-dog eyes on mine. “If you write about this, no one will believe you.”