Have you ever wondered why there aren’t cosy little Swiss restaurants
sprinkled around the world, the way there are French bistros, Italian
pizzerias and Chinese and Indian restaurants? What I mean is, have you wondered
for more than three seconds?
A clue: it’s the food. Trust me – I’ve just returned from a week in the
Jungfrau region, where I breakfasted, lunched and dined on Swiss cooking.
Swiss food is a bit like Mexican food: the last time you ate it was so long
ago (in my case, while visiting the Jungfrau a year earlier) that the next
time you try it, it seems novel and interesting all over again. Cheese
fondue – yum! Raclette – scrummy! Sausages the size of a baby’s arm peeking
out of a bread roll no bigger than a golf ball. Rösti! Rösti with fried
eggs! Rösti with fried eggs and ham! Rösti with grilled cheese! Rösti with
fried eggs, ham and grilled cheese! Did I mention the Swiss do fondue? And
raclette?
Same with Mexican food. This is the timeline of a visit to a Mexican
restaurant. Minute one: “Mmm… tortillas! Aah… tacos! Refried beans! Chicken
in a chocolate sauce!” Minute 92 in a Mexican restaurant: “Hey, do you
suppose the refried beans were imported from China? Because I would swear
they had a high lead content. Why else would I feel like I swallowed a
medicine ball?”
The Swiss and the Mexicans both seem gastronomically wed to carbohydrates:
bread in fondues; potatoes with raclette; potatoes in rösti. With Mexican
food you have tortillas, beans, tacos and more beans. The Swiss eat as if
they are all still dairy farmers, marching their cows up and down the
mountains whenever melted snow permits, and therefore have to consume vats
of carbohydrates every day to keep up their strength, while simultaneously
subsisting on their own dairy produce to make ends meet (hence all the
cheese and chocolate). A Swiss citizen is never more than 90 minutes away
from a snack of melted cheese. Nobody seems to have told them that they no
longer need to eat 18,000 calories a day; they work in offices nowadays, not
on mountains, and mostly produce money. Obviously, you can’t eat money, so
it is important that there remain enough poor labourers in the world to
plough fields and grow affordable food. But such people no longer dominate
Switzerland. In fact, this is one of the key weaknesses in the theory of
capitalism: the minute everyone in the world becomes as rich as a Swiss
banker, there’ll be no one left to grow our food. When that happens, we will
either have to start eating money from our bank accounts or consume the only
freely available protein left: namely, other humans who can’t run as fast as
we can.
Unlike an unending diet of fondue or burritos, you can always happily
contemplate a bowl of French onion soup or a plate of steak frites. That’s
why French bistros thrive. Actually, they don’t thrive as much as you
assume. We think they’re on every street corner, but there are far fewer in
Britain than we imagine. Those that exist are usually part of dreary
identikit chains, and it is only when you come across a place like
L’Absinthe that you appreciate how rare proper bistros are in this country.
L’Absinthe is the sort of bistro that is sprinkled like chopped parsley across
France. Pretty much everything about this restaurant is deliciously alien to
London dining. L’Absinthe is not part of a chain. You want to eat pretty
much every dish on the menu. Most main courses are under a tenner. A good
range of wines is sold at shop prices plus corkage. The staff look like they
are enjoying serving you.
And – are you ready? – they don’t churn tables.
“Might you have a table if I drop in at around 10.15pm on my way back from a
show?” I asked.
“I can’t guarantee,” was the reply. “We’re full and we let diners stay as long
as they want. We don’t kick people out. But I’m sure that someone will have
left by then, so there is a very good chance.”
The phrase “We let diners stay as long as they want” is something you hear as rarely
as “I love all of Sylvester Stallone’s movies”, or “I just can’t get enough
of Mick Hucknall’s voice”, or “If only I could find out where Russell Brand
gets his hair done!”
The line disconnected during our conversation and when I tried calling back
over the next 20 minutes, it was busy. I phoned the operator to check the
line was OK. She said: “I’ve just dialled the number and it was answered by
a cheery Frenchman who said that they’d had a busy morning.”
The cheery Frenchman is Jean-Christophe Slowik, L’Absinthe’s proprietor and
for the past two decades the front-of-house face at more than half a dozen
Marco Pierre White restaurants. All his staff seem to be French. Many of the
diners, too. It’s still tempting, whenever you find yourself peering through
the plate glass trying to decide where to eat, to interpret this as evidence
that the natives of the cuisine know a good thing when they eat it, even
though you’re keenly aware that McDonald’s outlets in Missouri are full of
Americans.
To his credit, where Slowik could have plumped for the full ’Allo ’Allo!
effect, he has listed dishes on the menu first in English and then in French
in a less prominent type below. It’s a small touch, but an endearing one in
an arena where many restaurants not only list dishes in French so they can
smirk at monoglot diners who have to request explanations, but also describe
ingredients and cooking methods using words they seem to have only just
invented (“Flambinard avec ses ongs, accompagné par truffe ‘Fifi’, sauce
Hortensaise”) so that even native Frenchies feel cowed.
L’Absinthe’s menu is the one you remember from French holidays. Leeks vinaigrette
with a poached egg, Bayonne ham with celeriac remoulade, a Lyonnaise salad
busy with frisée lettuce and lardons, a comforting plate of French toast
with mushrooms and shallots confit. Cassoulet was a bowlful of beans,
sausages and lamb under an umbrella of breadcrumbs. Duck confit came with
Savoy cabbage. Both dishes are under £10. Steak frites was a slice of
Scottish ribeye with excellent chips, the sort of dish that you hope to see
on every menu but is generally deemed too humdrum (restaurants tending to
use the word “humdrum” as a synonym for “Just what diners fancy”). The apple
tarte tatin looked sensational, but the kitchen had run out by the time we
ordered. A neighbouring, luckier table gave it the thumbs-up. A chocolate
cake was barely a notch firmer than a mousse.
Is the food at L’Absinthe the finest you’ll find anywhere in London? It would
be hard to put your hand on your heart and swear that it was. But most
people don’t go out to eat to run up a £100-per-head tab on
manicured mangetout. They go to meet friends, catch up with their partner,
avoid their own kitchen. Where better to do this than at L’Absinthe? If the
restaurant enjoys the success it deserves, and remains ungreedy enough not
to start kicking diners out to accommodate a second sitting, it will become
that mythic beast: the neighbourhood restaurant you’d love to find opening
up on a street corner near you. Especially if you’re Swiss.
L’Absinthe, 40 Chalcot Road, London NW1 (020-7483 4848). Lunch and
dinner, Tuesday to Sunday
I found Joe Jospeh's review of Swiss cuisnine patronising and inaccurate. He should try Geneva next time- a wide variety of dishes, including fresh lake fish ("Perche du Lac") and many bistros in the Carouge suburb! Germans-speaking Alpine regions are more limited- local ingredients are limited.
Roger, London, UK
Well, who likes typical Jungfrau-Region tourist dishes cooked for streams of English and Indian Tourists overrunning Interlaken season after season, when you can sit in a "grotto" (enoteca with local dishes) in Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland, enjoying a polenta di gran turco con capretto in umido (maize-polenta with leg of goat cooked in its juices)? Ever heard of the lucullic food varieties of the Engiadina-Valley in Grisons, Switzerland's Räto-Roman Part? The original dish "Basler Salm" (Salmon from River Rhine fished near the city of Basel)? The list is much longer and I could go on for hours. By the way Absinthe is a Swiss Invention and originates from Val de Travers near the city of Neuchatel in the French part. I recommend a great restaurant nearby "Georges Wenger's" in the town of Le Noirmont: 18 Gault Millau Points, 3 Michelin Stars.
Katrin Farner, Zurich, Switzerland
As the obesity rate in Switzerland (and France and Italy) is less than 10% and according to your piece the Swiss eat 18,000 calories per day, why then is it that the obesity rate in the UK is around 23% and is the highest in Europe? From your rationale, denizens of the UK presumably consume about 41,000 calories per day. If you're going to throw stones at a nation's dietary choices perhaps you should first step out of the glasshouse. That said, the review certainly made one want to visit L'Absinthe.
Ian Lee, Fremantle, Western Australia
"Rösti! Rösti with fried eggs! Rösti with fried eggs and ham! Rösti with grilled cheese! Rösti with fried eggs, ham and grilled cheese!"
So, they had rösti then... Seriously, providing it's well made, what's the problem? Personally, the thing I love about Europe's mountainous areas is the robust, meat and cheese-based breakfasts. Especially if there's any rösti going!
Ron, Birkenhead, England