Smelly, melted cheese

It's been pretty cold in town lately, which to a couple of my friends can mean only one thing: hot, melted cheese.  We trekked across to the Dark Side and huddled in the warm, smelly confines of the Swiss Chalet for our ritual.

I arrived very late thanks to a last-minute meeting, and the gang was already digging into their pots of fondue.  I decided to go for something else tonight.

A wintery treat

The temperature in Hong Kong has dropped significantly over the last week, and as I have been shivering in my apartment with typical thin walls, my thoughts have been turning to traditional winter meals.  I can always count on a few people to go for fondue, and we made a date to go to Swiss Chalet.

The restaurant is doing brisk business now that it has gotten colder, and they were very full when I arrived.  The atmosphere was warm (both literally and figuratively), and the beautiful smell of cheese filled the room.  I could hardly wait...

While I was tempted to start with a green salad, I wanted to do something a little bit more interesting.  To my dismay the restaurant ran out of puff pastry to make the lozärner chügeli pastetli, filled with veal, sweetbreads and the like.  I had to settle for warthog and mushroom sausage with mustard sauce and rösti.  This was kinda interesting, because the texture was harder and chewier than your normal German/Swiss wurst.  Unfortunately there were a lot of spices in the sausage, and together with the mustard sauce pretty much covered up any distinctive taste of the warthog meat.  The rösti was OK...I would have preferred it to be more browned.

Three of us shared a nice pot of es purre fondüü mit chnobli mit öpis filee, Härdöpfeli und gmües while my friend's wife took the raclette.  I wanted this version because of the Vacherin, and having some beef tenderloin cubes is a bit better than only getting the usual sides.  I do like raclette, but today I was in the mood to play with my food, and fondue is so much more fun!

I was happy with the cheese...especially after a while when some of the wine had evaporated and the mixture starts to thicken at the bottom of the caquelon.   We didn't manage to finish all the cheese, but were pretty stuffed already...

I brought a bottle of the 2007 De Villaine Bouzeron to go along with the fondue, as a lean wine such as Aligoté is meant to pair well with the dish.  Sure enough, the wine showed steely minerals with a good amount of acidity to cut through the richness of the cheese.  There was some degree of ripeness on the palate, and the wine tasted a little "hot".

While we all thought there was no more room for dessert, I scanned the dessert menu and found sabayon mit beereli undeme schuss cassis.  Warm sabayon has been one of my favorite desserts since my high school days in Singapore, and it's really hard to find.  Of course I wasn't gonna pass it up!  The whipped egg yolk cream arrived in a brandy snifter, and the waitress poured some crème de cassis into the glass, settling on top of different berries at the bottom.  I was smiling as I scooped spoonfuls of the stuff into my mouth.  The rich, eggy taste of it (apparently made with 2 yolks) combined with the sweet Marsala wine was just so yummy.  It's been too long since I last had a good, warm sabayon...so despite being really full - and past the point where I stopped enjoying each incremental spoonful - I chose to finish the whole thing.

If there was a way for me to walk back home to the Hong Kong side, I would have.  After a meal like this - and I don't want to know the calorie count - it almost seems appropriate to curl up somewhere and hibernate...  It was certainly a perfect meal for a chilly winter night.

Simple food in Geneva - Day 1

I'm in Geneva for a few days on business, exploring the city in my free time and sampling the cuisine at this cosmopolitan city. While I was lucky enough to get reservations at some Michelin-starred restaurants, I was equally excited about the simple, hearty cuisine of the region.

My first meal in the city was lunching solo at Le Relais de l'Entrecote, a restaurant only steps from my hotel. This happen to have been rated highly in Zagat's in terms of food, and as I passed by around lunch time, I popped in and got myself a table. This place is ultra busy. Waitresses were dancing around tables like bees pollinating flowers, bringing customers their plates of food.

There is only one dish here, and that is steak frites. There is a simple plate of salad, and pieces of baguette to start. Then the main event: a warm plate with half a portion of entrecote - 5 slices or so - is served with loads of thin, crispy frites. The waitress makes sure that you get plenty of the sauce, which tastes like a cross between pesto and green curry. I asked for medium instead of bleu, thinking that in French-speaking Geneva, bleu would be really raw. Well, the meat was pink on the inside, but a tad on the dry side for my taste. Guess I should have tried bleu... Or was it because the meat was so lean, unlike what I am used to at Entrecote in Hong Kong? Anyway. The sauce, as has been written, was delicious. I finish the steak and gobble up most of the large portion of frites.

As I was debating whether it was advisable to finish all of the frites, the kind waitress comes over an dumps the other half of the entrecote in my plate. I'm in shock at this point. I was grateful for the small portion of meat when it first arrived, as it would allow me to eat lots of frites without overstuffing myself. Now I realized - quelle horreur! - that the restaurant wasn't skimping on the meat. I was just about full at this point, but couldn't very well toss the meat back. I decide to give it my best shot, and end up taking down another 4 out of 5 slices in the second serving... I am stuffed, on the verge of feeling a little sick from the large amount of rich food. But I'm happy. This simple and delicious lunch is just what I wanted.

I blew off my friend Nunu for dinner that evening, as work took a lot longer than I expected. We gave up our restaurant reservation and she stayed home with the kids. Past 10pm, I am left with relatively few choices for dining venues. Nunu suggest that I look around rue de Pâquis - the colorful red-light district where there would be interesting choices of ethnic food. I make my way on foot to the neighborhood, and pass by a number of Turkish joints selling doner kebabs as well as some Chinese places.

In the end I settled on Auberge de Savièse, a Swiss restaurant mentioned in the outdated copy of Lonely Planet that I borrowed from a friend. I'm in Switzerland, so what else should I order but raclette? I start with a simple green salad, then proceed to enjoy two portions of the melted cheese. I was very tempted to have more cheese, but I was getting very tired and decided not to stuff myself at such a late hour. Satisfied with myself for having enjoyed the local specialty, I make my way back to the hotel and call it a night.