(Manfred Klimek: text & photo)
In the photo above, a man is sitting at a green table, looking as grumpy as one looks in Vienna when one is actually in an excellent mood. Beside him is a woman who is rearranging glasses and chairs. Behind them: vines, trees, early summer. The man looks astonishingly like Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, had Cocker at some point decided to produce Gemischter Satz rather than Britpop. The woman is Jutta Ambrositsch. The man is Marco Kalchbrenner. Together, they run the Buschenschank in Residence in Grinzing. Since superlatives are usually nonsense, I use them sparingly. Here I make an exception: this is the greatest Buschenschank in the world.
Not the most beautiful. Not the most luxurious. Not the most famous. Simply the greatest.
If only because nothing here feels spruce or over-polished. The tables are simple. So are the benches. The garden, with quite a lot of concrete, makes no attempt to apply for an architecture prize. You sit among vines and trees and alongside people who have genuinely come for wine & food. Not for Instagram. Not for Viennese clichés. Not for a tourist's idea of a Heuriger. The Buschenschank in Residence is the opposite of that Heuriger hell which, in many places, consists of Viennese kitsch, ready-made spreads and coachloads of tourists. Here, people work who take wine and food seriously, but themselves pleasingly little.
The staff alone are a small sensation. Federal German post-punk instead of Viennese waiter folklore. Bar assistant Jakob Schönberger, himself an excellent vintner, moves through the evening with that mixture of competence and at times seemingly detached indifference possessed only by people who can genuinely do something. No one here explains the world unprompted. No one gives lectures on minerality. No one wants to impress. That is precisely why everything impresses.
And then there is the food. Thum's marinated veal tongue belongs to those dishes that ought really to be banned, because afterwards other veal tongues scarcely make sense any more. Tender, juicy, perfectly judged in flavour. At first, the cucumber salad seems like a mere side note, then reveals itself as a juicy masterpiece of that Austrian cuisine which does more with a few ingredients than others do with twenty – a little more pepper, or caraway, would be lovely. The shredded calf's head, meanwhile, arrives with a heat that smashes every wellness notion to pieces. Brutal. Magnificent. Precise. No dish for cowards. Alongside it, a cheese selection that was not put together to meet some costing requirement, but because someone evidently loves cheese.
What holds it all together, however, are the wines. Jutta Ambrositsch has for years been one of Austria's most interesting winemakers. Her wines possess that rare ability to be massively serious and overwhelmingly drinkable at the same time. Not a gram of excess weight. Not a gram of vanity. The Riesling Utopie from the Rosengartl vineyard is marked by an almost taxing clarity of vinification, without ever calling into question either the variety or this Viennese expression of it, which could hardly be less Germanic. The Blaufränkisch Hoellwaerts sits exactly where Blaufränkisch should sit: juicy, cool, spicy, without that over-extraction with which some winemakers sometimes disguise their uncertainty. And then the two Gemischte Sätze. In the Schlegel bottle (Fürchtegott), they seem almost western Hungarian in their matter-of-factness. In the litre bottle (Ein Liter Wien), on the other hand, they remind us that wine above all wants to be drunk and should taste good, without us wanting to philosophise about the tasting. Both work. Both belong here. Also new is the Chardonnay Himmelwaerts, which, freshly bottled, needs air and time before it can properly pronounce its grand Northern Burgundy quotation.
Nothing here has to be anything other than what it is. Gemischter Satz is allowed to be Gemischter Satz. The veal tongue, veal tongue. The garden, a garden. The host, Jarvis Cocker from Grinzing. And precisely from this comes something that has become rare: authenticity without a marketing department. The two do not need one either, because Jarvis Cocker from Grinzing was a gifted copywriter and Mrs Jutta an excellent commercial artist – the labels are, needless to say, her work
We leave this Buschenschank with the feeling that perhaps the world has not yet been completely taken over by concepts, target-group analyses and staged experiences. There are still places that simply work. The Buschenschank in Residence is such a place.
For it is the greatest Buschenschank in the world.
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