It’s the Cheese: Lugano
Swiss Bistro Still Shows What Life is All About - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The
editors at the Monterey County (CA) Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) knew they had a treasure house of
multicultural restaurants in a community each time I queried for an article with
about five restaurant suggestions along with international dishes they served
and distinctive herbs and ingredients used in the cuisine.
I
loved Carmel’s Swiss Restaurant Lugano for its gemüchlikeit German charm in the
German side of the restaurant and dolce vita charm in the Italian side of the
restaurant.
The
editors of the Monterey County Weekly asked
me to review Lugano and sample more than fondue despite its being
excellent. (They knew my mother’s family
was from Wisconsin.) My article follows:
It’s the Cheese
When
my husband Laurent and I yearned for some Old World charm on our recent
anniversary, we headed out to Lugano Swiss Bistro in the Barnyard in Carmel,
California.
We
used to sit on the German side of the restaurant enjoying its carved wood and
beer tankard decorations, but now we prefer the Italian side with its painted
street scenes of gelati vendors and florists.
The
night of our anniversary, we ordered Swiss onion soup and original Swiss
fondue. Swiss onion soup tastes like
French onion soup. They both use beef
broth and excellent gruyère cheese in their making.
We
continued our cheese fest with fondue, a dish said to have originated in the
French-speaking part of Switzerland. The
creamy texture made from bubbling gruyère, emmenthal, and appenzellar cheese
makes it tempting to drop bread cubes into Lugano’s fondue and just fish them
out with spoons of cheese.
The
penalty for doing something like this according to A Little Swiss Cookbook (ISBN – 0-86281-271-2 published by Appletree
Press) by Jacqueline Martinet is to buy another bottle of white wine like
Fendant du Valais for your party.
Laurent's
favorite wine, though, for fondue at Lugano’s is Père Patriarche. This slightly sour wine perfectly cuts the
rich cheese flavors of the fondue and aids in digestion.
After
my dinner with Laurent, I went to dinner with one of my writing group friends,
who was looking for restaurants with “locals” menus during slow times during
the week.
We
went on a Tuesday night and started our meal with a Swiss specialty called
Bunderfleisch, air-dried beef. These are
slices of beef that taste like a meaty prosciutto, but not as delicate.
This
was the first time I ate bunderfleisch, and I liked it. Usually, bunderfleisch is served before
fondue or another cheese specialty called raclette, which is cheese that melts
out of cheese crust onto plates for spreading.
You eat sweet cornichon pickles with that cheese fest.
End
of Part 1.
To
be continued.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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