Category: Gourmet Atlas

A quartet of young Zurich restaurateurs consisting of Beni Ott, Simon Leuzinger, Markus Ott and Basil Nufer run the new restaurant in the National Museum.

They simply call their restaurant “Spitz”, a reference to the nearby Platzspitz. Consisting of a bistro (Musuems-Cafe), a bar (with a large exquisite whisky collection) and a restaurant.

The Spitz’s kitchen concept is based on the slow food concept, but takes a broader view. The focus is always on a first-class, sustainably produced product – preferably from Switzerland. Without much frippery, Basil Nufer explained to the Tagesanzeiger on 18.3.2016
here
.

Incidentally, the main supplier is Pico Bio, from whom we (vegan kitchen) also obtain all the vegetables for our catering.

The prices in the new Landesmuseum restaurant are somewhere between the lower and upper mid-range.

But quality comes at a high price:

As an appetizer (CHF 16.-) I got a hearty salad of fresh cherries and herbs, I’ve never had anything like it and it was indescribably good!

For my main course, a vegetable arrangement (pictured) with edible capuchin flowers and cress, dried fennel and beans, I paid CHF 38. But it was also really excellent.

My main course also (unconsciously?) referred to the
biological value
was taken into account: In addition to my beans (protein in the vegetable arrangement), mashed potatoes (starchy side dish) in the form of white mousse- points served. What I found particularly refreshing about the choice of dishes is that they were both made without any
meat analogs
at all.

For dessert, we topped off the pure plant-based meal with a sorbet of two kinds of passion fruit and wild berries decorated with various fresh berries on a lavender sauce: despite the bad summer, the berries were not sour (but not too sweet either) and the whole dessert was simply perfectly balanced.

This finish was too good to remember the price. Anyway, I can highly recommend the Spitz – just ask for vegan options, they are not on the menu! It’s not a vegan restaurant, but open to your wishes (Basil, the chef himself, tells me).

You can also do as I did: simply order a “vegan three-course meal” when you make your reservation and be surprised.

restaurantspitz.ch

The rain clouds have cleared and made way for the summer sun – a good time to try the new vegan ice creams from Lusso for the first time.

I’m holding two multipacks of Tofuline vegan ice cream in my hands. Big Peak, the cornet version and Pearl, the little sister on a stick. The packaging is too cheerfully purple for my taste.

But well, I don’t eat the packaging, I eat the contents and I decide to unwrap the Big Peak glacé first. My fiancé and my two-year-old daughter are also getting one.

A ball covered in a thin layer of chocolate sits on a cornet wafer, unaware that it will soon end up in my stomach. First I nibble away a piece of chocolate – it tastes delicate and fine – and then I uncover the vanilla ice cream.

A first lick, a first bite and I’m amazed. It really does feel like a cream glacé, even though there isn’t a drop of milk in it. The ice cream is made from soy. The vanilla flavor is neither too intense nor too weak and the sweetness is just my thing.

Oh, what’s that? After the second bite, I taste strawberry and my eyes confirm what my tongue has reported: a strawberry-red dot appears on the ice cream ball.

This strawberry sauce turned out a little too sweet for me, but as the vanilla is the main flavor component, I can live with it.

My fiancé is even very good. He didn’t take the step from vegetarian to vegan for a long time, mainly because of ice cream and desserts. Now he’s grinning like a boy and thinks the strawberry sauce is so delicious that he even dips the tip of his tongue in it. My little daughter watches him and utters a vehement “Mis Glacé!”, clutching her vanilla cornet tightly.

Now I’m curious about the yellowish waffle. Yellowish waffle? Yes, the waffle is made from corn. After all, Lusso wasn’t just thinking of vegans and people with lactose intolerance, but also anyone who suffers from gluten intolerance.

The corn waffle tastes good, but is too moist and could be crispier. I don’t know whether it’s the corn or the fact that the chocolate coating on the inside of the cornet isn’t thick enough to separate the wafer from the moist ice cream and keep it dry.

Njam, njam, njam, I’ve almost reached the end. With the last bite, Lusso fulfills an old cornet tradition: the waffle tip is filled with chocolate.

Enough ice cream for today. We save the second variety, Tofuline “Pearl”, for tomorrow.

When I tear open the multipack, the first thing I notice is that the ice cream is a dwarf ice cream. The oval glacé body on the stick is seven centimetres long. It seems as if it was produced for (small) children or did someone at Lusso also have women in mind who pay meticulous attention to their summer figure?

Be that as it may, the chocolate coating on this version is also fine and delicate, but it covers a strawberry glacé rather than a vanilla glacé. Here, too, the framing effect is astonishing, but the family verdict is unanimous: the strawberry ice cream tastes too sweet.

Conclusion: The Cornet “Big Pearl” will find its way back into our freezer, but “Pearl” tastes too sweet for us. Both are available in larger Coop supermarkets.