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
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