Basel Eating: Volkshaus Brasserie

Last week a tweet caught my eye. It was Architectural Digest's 10 most beautifully designed new restaurants and I was intrigued, despite not holding much hope that any of the listed restaurants would be anywhere near me. But lo and behold -- one of them was in Basel and I was heading there in a matter of days. Huzzah!

So I booked a table at Volkshaus Brasserie and put my eating pants on. The food in Basel is generally good: they city's status as a hub of industry and commerce on both the French and German borders mean that a lot of business lunches and dinners go down here. What the city does best, food-wise, is a fairly traditional take on French-Germanic staples. This is Switzerland, and Switzerland, if nothing else, likes to play to its strengths: dairy, sausages, spuds and lip-smackingly good onion sauce.

Volkshaus Brasserie's chef, Marc Arnold, stays close to the brasserie menu model: there's croque madame with salad (ie, toasted Gruyere cheese and ham on toast with two sunny-side-up fried eggs; CHF22), excellent veal sausage with the ubiquitous rösti and crispy onions (CHF25) and steak-frites (with either bearnaise or herb butter sauce; CHF42). But there are also a few welcome surprises; mine came in the form of an entire boiled artichoke served with tomato vinaigrette, which may just have my vote for best shared entrée of the year. I'm surprised this dish doesn't feature on more menus: it's simple, ideal for a relaxed start to proceedings and very beautiful to look at -- the ideal finger food, in other words.

The room itself is much like the artichoke; elegant and deceptive in its simplicity. Designed by the famed Herzog + de Meuron, the 1925 room's tricksiest element is the dozens of large-scale light bulbs, which cast a flattering glow over night-time proceedings. In the day, enormous windows looking out onto the beer garden allow natural light to flood the space. Floors are dark wood, high-backed banquette seats are of dark green leather, tables and chairs gleam and walls are either black or white. The sense of space, the stark elegance of its proportions and the simplicity of it all put the diner at ease. Add comfort food to the mix and you can see why people are so impressed. This is not a buttoned-up affair, but a neighbourhood haunt that just happens to be extremely pleasing to the eye.

Service is surprisingly relaxed by Basel standards. It's good: attentive and polite, and avoids the usual Basel display of pushing you along in a bid to demonstrate just how efficient everything in Switzerland is, including the dining experience. That said, this is still not the sort of place to dawdle over the menu -- they really don't understand that kind of thing in these parts. 

The drinks list for the Volkshaus is the standard cafe list throughout Switzerland. There are no great surprises here, but that's fine. This place is all about ingesting the familiar and being able to admire the surrounds.

After dinner we retired to the bar, which is, as you'd expect, beautiful. It's all dark walls and nooks, a long zinc bar and old-fashioned zinc tables, miniscule white tiles on the floor and more large-scale light bulbs. Shame about the rather pedestrian cocktail list and the music (R&B just doesn't go with these surrounds). 

All in all, this place is indeed as lovely to look at as reported, and invitingly free of pretension. I can't wait to return in Summer, when the beer garden will come into its own. 

 

  

 

Address: Rebgasse 12, CH-4058 Basel
Prices: entrées CHF22-24; mains CHF25-56
Best for: Simple, well-executed dishes that allow you to relax into the wonderful surrounds

Day Ten of Back2Blog

And I only missed one! It's been a real eye-opener for me, doing this exercise in reconnecting with my blog. I neglect it terribly, mostly because I struggle to define the nature of blogging and the kind of topics I want to cover. I've been touched by the people who have reached out to say hello and impressed with Stephanie's 'get up and go' in getting people to do this.

Tomorrow, I head to Basel for a couple of days. I'll be catching up with a dear friend, checking out some great restaurants (reviews to come, I promise) and maybe even getting a little reading done on the train. I can't wait. I need to do some walking that doesn't involve pushing a stroller uphill.

Thanks for reading this blog these last 10 days -- it's been a real tonic, and a great reminder that no matter what the weather (and honestly, I am almost embarrassed at how dependent I am on blue sky in order to feel normal), I need to sit down every day and write something, whether it's in a journal, for a blog, for someone else or even a proper email to a loved one.

Thank you Steph,  for getting me back out there.

Lausanne Eating: Brasserie Bavaria

A couple of weeks back my other half and I went to Brasserie Bavaria. The name should be giveaway enough as to what you'll be eating: no creative salads or tasting plates of miso-braised cod here!

The menu is all pork, potato, cheese and beer (no less than 80 of them). This place is all about drinking, and soaking up that drinking with the most reliable dietary sponges that German engineering has given us: carbs, cabbage and cooked pig.

Denis had the Grande Choucroute (Large Sauerkraut, top picture). It consisted of a few kilos of pork taking a breather on a bed of excellent sauerkraut (subtle, light, definitely homemade) and a boiled spud. The meat selection featured thick sliced bacon, a pork steak, a couple of wiener sausages, ham on the bone and a slice of local Vaudois snag. I can't think why he has high cholesterol.

I went for something a little more kosher (though not really): an incredibly good rösti (grated potato cake) that was as a fluffy as a cloud despite being studded with pan-fried bacon. It was covered in melted raclette cheese and then topped with paper-thin slices of dried beef. Some cocktail onions and cornichons provided light relief.

Service was curt, to put it kindly. I think the waitstaff may have been trained by the notoriously grumpy dames across the road at the Romande. That said, our food appeared within 10 minutes of us walking through the door, making this an ideal spot for a quick bite before the theatre or the opera. Or going home to watch TV...

The decor looks as though the proprietor glanced at a paint chart and decided to just let the local smokers stain the walls, but there are some lovely friezes and plenty of wood panelling, just in case you can't stomach another bloody Eames chair or communal table covered in design magazines (granted, this is not much of a problem in Lausanne).

At the Bavaria, the closest thing to fusion is when the cheese sticks to the meat, and we're glad of it.

Address: Rue du Petit-Chêne 10, CH 1003 Lausanne (just near Place St François)
Prices: choucroutes CHF26-42; röstis CHF19.50-42; 'festival of ox tongue and pork knuckle' dishes CHF27.50-35.50
Best for: fast, comforting staples of great quality; torturing annoying people with food issues

Ten Years

I'm coming up to the 10-year anniversary of quitting smoking. I wish I could say that my lungs have never felt better, but that's not strictly true (the air in Lausanne is vile -- I have had 'allergies' since moving here and we need to use a humidifier from October to May just to breathe).

What is true is that there's no way I could have run a half-marathon last year at the age of 42 had I still been a smoker, and I'd probably be suffering from something a lot nastier than boring old allergies.


When I do some rough sums I calculate that I have managed to save about AUD$30,0000 since quitting the gaspers. I'm using 2003 prices for these sums; I believe that cigarettes now cost around AUD$75 and a limb per pack back home. 

And just like that I found a bargain in Switzerland! Cigarettes are really cheap here (we're talking 1999 prices): something about smokers' rights, Big Tobacco being based in Lausanne and the air already being poisonous enough.

So, 10 years. How to celebrate that? I have a limited budget (despite not spending that AUD$30,000 on ciggies) and not much time, and the shops here are pretty crap. I'm thinking a nice scarf -- one that doesn't reek of stale tobacco.

A Short One

Today is a mess. Nothing is working and it's just tears all round. Bas is sad, I'm sad and tomorrow is Sunday, the most miserable day of the week, where we'll be on our own, yet again.

I hate Sundays here. They are funereal. Just the thought of tomorrow is already dragging me down.

Think I'll watch Mad Men tonight.

Coming up for Air

The sun is shining today, thank heavens, so I think we'll stick our noses past the front door and see if we can grab some fresh air. It's a simple thing, seeing the sun, but it makes an enormous difference. Even though it's freezing outside, just knowing that I can let a little sunlight into the flat to freshen the air does me the power of good. 

We're both feeling a little better today. No one has thrown up, breakfast was eaten and we watched The Wind in the Willows on DVD. Bas refused to eat his lunch so I sent him to bed and he actually did it without a tantrum. He's a tricky one to feed: there seems to be a one-minute window of opportunity when he comes to me without warning and says 'Mummy, I'm really hungry' and then his appetite is gone. I made one of his favourites for lunch today and had it ready in plenty of time. No dice, just cranky pants. The feeding thing does my head in, especially now that Bas has lost so much weight after being sick so many times this winter.

A few weeks ago we had to take him to the Children's Hospital to have blood drawn while he was under anaesthesia (his veins are too tricky for the usual blood drawing at the doctor's). His doctor wants to rule out allergies and any other problems, given his tiny size. He's fine. His blood is good, he's calm in medical surrounds and he even made the nurse in the recovery room laugh by sleeping well past the five-minute mark after the procedure. At one point another nurse came in and saw him, still sleeping, and said 'What's going on? Why's he still out?'. The first nurse explained that Bas had gone into nap time, no doubt making the most of the nice big bed and the fact that the sheets were not littered with rice-cake crumbs.

It's awful seeing your child so vulnerable. Children's hospitals make you painfully aware of how lucky you are in many ways. Bas looked so tiny and frail while going under (thank you to the lovely anaesthetist, who not only let me come into the operating room with Basi, but also held my hand as Basi drifted off, eyes rollign back in his head, explaining that 'everyone does this'). Thankfully, the look on Basi's face when he came to (having seen the tractor and the dinosaur that were keeping him company) allayed any fears. He was allowed to eat as much chocolate as he wanted that day, and in his usual capricious style, he didn't give a rat's. The only thing he gave a rat's about was the dinosaur (hospital property).

Try to eat more, OK Basibou? And spare us any extra trips to the hospital.

Laundry Day

Many seemingly simple chores become more complicated when there's no one around to lend a hand with the toddler. Things like ducking up to the shops to get food (that's just going to be regurgitated within the hour, but we have to keep trying) and doing the laundry.

Today is laundry day for me. I get one full day every three weeks to do my laundry in the communal space. You read that right.

Our dirty laundry system has become an object of fascination for a number of people in Australia, mainly because it all seems so uptight, so regimented... so Swiss. I suspect my father thinks we live in a tenement.

The building's communal laundry is downstairs, in the bomb shelter (yes, really -- a supposedly neutral country needs bomb shelters in every building). Until fairly recently in our building there was a strict system in effect that allowed each apartment access to the laundry (via a key left in your mailbox) one day every three weeks. For years the washing machine and dryer laundry were kept locked up, for what exact reason I never knew why -- perhaps to stop people just enjoying a spin cycle at their leisure? Mixing whites and coloureds?

The schedule for the tennants' washing days is posted on the door down in the bowels of the building, meaning that I can tell you on precisely which days I will be doing the washing for the rest of the year. When I was doing some bookbinding work at a gallery down in Cully a few years back I was reluctant to tell the woman I was working for that I wouldn't be able to make it one day because it was washing day. I expected her to question my commitment to the job, or at least roll her eyes at such a lame 1950s reason to not come into work, but she totally got it.

Our biggest recurring row in the lead-up to Bas's birth was about buying a washing machine to put in the kitchen so I wouldn't have to deal with the stink of soiled baby clothes for three weeks (and of course it would be me dealing with it, because I do all the laundry, without fail). I had to ambush Denis at a dinner party where our guests basically laid into him for thinking we could cope with the old roster system with a newborn.

I asked Denis why 'they' couldn't just leave the door unlocked and people could bring down their baskets and take their chances on the machine being free, the way the building where I Iived in Melbourne, with over 30 apartments, did it. He looked at me for a moment and said, 'That would be anarchy.'

So today, it's nausea all round, freezing outside (although blue skies at least), a child who refuses to nap and my one chance to wash all the filth and pestilence out of everything we own and have it dry in time to be back on the bed tonight. Not anarchy at all.