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Showing posts with label Lugano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lugano. Show all posts

Monday, February 19, 2018

Sampling Swiss Cuisine with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget





Sampling Swiss Cuisine with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



Lugano Swiss Bistro in Carmel (California) is an oasis of Old World European charm in Monterey County.  My family has celebrated birthdays and anniversaries there over two decades.

My editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) absolutely wanted an article from this Monterey County “happy times” restaurant.  The following is the article I wrote for the Weekly:

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 Shopping Center in Carmel Valley.

We liked to sit on the German side of the restaurant, enjoying its carved wood and beer tankard decorations, but we now 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 the original Swiss Fondue.  I cannot detect a difference between French and Swiss onion soup, but I will say that the melted gruyè cheese on Lugano’s soup had a tang to it that you do not get when you use “Swiss-style” cheese.

We continued our cheese test with fondue, a dish said to have originated in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.  The creamy texture made from bubbling gruyère, emmenthal, and appenzeller cheese makes it tempting to drop the bread cube into Lugano’s fondue.

The penalty for dropping your bread in the fondue according to A Little Swiss Cookbook by Jacqueline Martinet is to buy another bottle of wine for your party.

Laurent’s favorite wine for fondue at Lugano is the Père Patriarche.  This slightly sour wine perfectly cuts the rich cheese flavors of the fondue and aids in digestion.  When we go to Lugano with a large group, we like to order the Swiss Fendant du Valais for its perky flavor that can stand up to the cheese like Père Patriarche.

After dinner with Laurent, I came back a few days later with my friend C., who was looking for restaurants with locals’ specials.  Lugano fits the ticket on Tuesday nights.

We started our meal with a Swiss specialty Buenderfleisch, air-dried beef.  These thin slices of beef taste like a meaty, prosciutto, but not as delicate.

This was the first time my friend C. and I ate buenderfleisch, and we both liked it.  Usually buenderfleisch gets served before fondue or another specialty called raclette, which I ordered as my main dish.

Raclette’s history evokes Switzerland’s pastoral heritage.  As snow melts in the spring, cow herders take cattle higher up on the mountain slopes until they reach the lushest pastures at the foot of the glaciers.

The herders stay on these high pastures all summer and make rich cheese.  Villagers go up to the pastures where they heat half-wheels of the new cheese over branch fires.  They scrape the melted cheese over steamed, new potatoes making raclette.

Lugano’s raclette lived up to my foodie musings.  Generous amounts of Swiss cheese covered the potatoes finally.  Sour, cornichon pickles added crunchiness and a sour taste to the rich, cheese dish I had ordered.

C. took advantage of the special night to order a roast rack of lamb with demi-glazed, seasonal vegetables.  The tender lamb was juicy with a slight crust to make perfection.  It takes decades of roasting to make this dish look simple.

I will definitely order this for myself when I come back to Lugano.  C’s large side dish of Swiss roesti potatoes merited attention.

Roesti roughly translates as “potato pancake,” but roesti are more than a side dish in Swiss cuisine.

The Swiss eat them for breakfast along with milky coffee.  To make roesti potatoes, the cook boils waxy potatoes, peels them, and then rubs them through a grinder.  Finally, the potatoes are fried in lard with a little bacon until they form a sturdier version of hash browns.

Lugano offers several interesting beers.  We drank a Spaten Oktoberfest from Germany and a Czechvar Lager from Czechoslovakia with our meal.  The Oktoberfest beer is a smooth beer while Czechvar has more bite to it.  Beer and cheese just seem to go together.

After we had eaten, the co-owner insisted that we try a chocolate fondue that usually comes as part of the four-course fondue dinner.  The light chocolate in no way resembled the thick chocolate concoctions I create at home.

I was skeptical about how cantaloupe dunked in chocolate would taste, but it was good.  Musk melon, bananas, and strawberries tasted wonderful with the warm, chocolate coating as well.  Part of the reason for this may have been that the fruit was perfectly ripe.

The food is the obvious Old World European attraction to Lugano Swiss Bistro, but the restaurant literally exudes genuetlichkeit – German friendliness and coziness.

The restaurant employs accordion players and German Alpine Trio players once a month.  I have even heard yodeling when this group takes the stage.

End of Article

When Florence would come along to this restaurant, the waiters would pick up the Alpine cow sculpture and run around with the bell clanging on her birthday - Silly stuff, but fun.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books




Ruth Paget Selfie