On Tuesday, 21 May, we took a morning train to Salzburg, the second of three train trips on this vacation, and the shortest at just 2.5 hours. The Vienna train station is a big, confusing place, and in order to find your platform you need to know the layout of the place. There are signs posted, but it's a good idea to check a guidebook and to plan ahead to leave extra time. For this leg of the trip there were several times that we could have used some help, even with two German-speakers among our number, but there were no employees to help out, and unlike in Italy and the US, we got no help from other travelers either.
From the Salzburg train station it's a 15 minute taxi ride to the Altstadthotel Weisse Taube, where we were staying. Owen went to college in Salzburg, so he and Brigitte had a different hotel and mostly other things to see; we split up until dinner time.
Our hotel was near the Mozartplatz, on the edge of the Altstadt shopping area on the west side of the River Salzach, which divides the city. We had a maze of narrow medieval streets lined with shops and cafes to explore, so we set to it with determination. We hadn't gone far before I had bought a bottle of local marillenschnaps and Lorna had bought a giraffe!
We had lunch at the Altstadt Cafe in the Radisson hotel. I had Sacherwurstel, which sounded very Austrian but turned out to be two foot-long hot dogs. They were flavorful and mild, and they had no need for a big puffy bread bun. The various types of wurste are popular all over Austria and Germany, with descriptive prefixes like gelbwurst, blutwurst, weisswurst, rosbratwurst, and leberwurst. The Viennese standard seems to be the frankfurterwurst and its longer cousin the sacherwurst, plus the cheesy krasekainer.
Just a week later in Northern Italy I found Wurstel as a product in many convenience stores and supermarkets: it was the frankfurter, which we call hot dog, and some in these parts call a Vienna sausage, but it's not like those little abominations in the Hormel can. It's no surprise since the Austrian Empire controlled northeastern Italy for generations, but even as far away as Reggio Calabria at the toe of the boot we found Wurstel pizza!
We shared a thin flatbread of corn and red peppers, like a pizza with no cheese or tomato sauce, that wasn't particularly Austrian but it was vegetarian and delicious. Mel had some delicious wild garlic dumplings because it is indeed Austrian and quite seasonal for May. Lorna had grilled trout, and Lorna and Melissa finished with traditional Palatschinken, or crepes filled with apricot jam. Lorna had had palatschinken first nine years earlier in Munich and remembered it well, so it became a go-to dessert for her on this trip. She had also had the Czech version at the home of Jana's parents, where it was served as dumplings rather than as crepes.
I had hoped to see the Christmas museum, but it's closed on Tuesdays. However I did get to explore the bigger part of the city on the east side of the river before returning to the altstadt quarter for our pre-arranged rendezvous before a special dinner. We met at Cafe Tomaselli just as it started to rain lightly. Owen and Brigitte were there when I arrived, but Lorna and Melissa were still shopping.
Cafe Tomaselli is a big place facing an open square, great for people watching and it serves a lot of traditional Austrian treats. I had an Einspanner and a slice of Dobos Torte. The Einspanner is a coffee drink of a double-shot of hot espresso with an equal amount of whipped cream on top. The name also means a one-horse carriage, but I don't know how they came to be synonymous. The Dobos Torte is a stack of thin layers of sponge cake with chocolate buttercream filling, surrounded with crushed hazelnuts or walnuts, and topped with a layer of crisp caramel. I had wanted to try an authentic one for decades! The Viennese coffee culture is something I wish we had in the United States, but it relies as much on unhurried patrons as it does on patient proprietors, and both seem hard to come by these days at home.
When we were all gathered, after a period of relaxing and discussing our discoveries, we walked up the steep hillside to dinner at Stiegl Keller, a famous Salzburger brauhaus with a commanding view over the rooftops of the city. We started with a flight of seven of their beers, shared among those of us who were interested. Each serving was about twice the size of what we usually see in a brewery at home, so it was plenty of beer as an opener. We also ordered two appetizers. The vegetarian one was deep-fried large white asparagus on a salad. Asparagus was in season and on every menu, and these were very large white asparagus, as big around as my index finger and about seven inches long).
We also got a brettljause. A brettljause is a "snack-board" of meats, cheese, and grammerln with pickles and salad. The meats were two varieties of thin-sliced Austrian wursts, and the cheeses were a mild Tilsit and a sharper local mountain cheese made from sheep's milk. Grammerln (that's not a misspelling) is pork fatback chopped finely and rendered slowly with little bits of pork in it. The fat melts and the pork fries slowly. The finished product is cooled and used like butter, with little "cracklins" of fried pork. It's often spread on rye or pumpernickel bread, or other robustly flavored and textured breads, and served with pickles and cheese.
For dinner I had 6 stuffed little dumplings (ham, bacon, seasoned pork) on sauerkraut. Owen and Brigitte had the classic roast pork with crackly skin. Lorna had trout (again - she really didn't care for the other freshwater fish on offer anywhere in Czechia or Austria), and Melissa had deep-fried cheese dumplings on sauerkraut. In Austrian cuisine, sauerkraut is used a lot, but it's usually rinsed and then cooked with herbs so it is much milder that the sauerkraut that you take fresh and pungent from the bag. When you do it like this, it becomes a nice backdrop for any number of main dishes, with a mild flavor that supports the main dish rather than clashing with it.
We finished with a seasonal and delicious deep fried rhubarb with raspberry sauce, and with a beautiful puffy Salzburger Nockerl. Salzburger nockerl is an iconic dessert from Salzburg, a great pillow of meringue baked on a bed of raspberry sauce and served hot and puffy from the oven with the sauce bubbling beneath it. I can'r wait to try this recipe at home for friends!
The rain had faded to a drizzle when we were walking up to the restaurant and it stopped completely while we were eating. We had spent two hours and lots of Euros so we gave Mother Nature every opportunity to help us out, and she obliged.
The walk back down the hill was beautiful and peaceful. There may have been people lingering over coffee back in the Mozartplatz, or maybe the rain had chased them all inside, but for our walk down the hill that evening along that cobbled medieval street we felt like we were alone in the most charming place in all the world.
Some of the feeling may have been a sense of farewell to Austria. In the morning we'd rush to another morning train and then spend hours heading south through the rugged Brenner Pass in the Alps into the Tyrol and eventually to the sunny Venetian lagoon.