Post 37 – Swiss Cuisine

They eat sone fucked up stuff in Switzerland. Thursday’s lunch menu at work had the option of grilled kangaroo or stewed rabbit. I had the kangaroo. It was delicious, but quite chewy. And who can forget the shark soup and pig brains from last week?

Last night, we went out for dinner, and after doing a runner from what promised to be a Mexican restaurant while waiting for a table (it had Mexican menus in the window, but when we went in there were no menus, only a buffet full of sushi and vegetables, and people were actually cooking their own food at their tables. It seemed to confusing so we legged it), we ended up at a nice looking and very upmarket Swiss/French restaurant in Quartier de Champel (the suburb where I live). The menus were all in French, but all extremely pretentious French so it was virtually impossible to pick any words out, and despite the best efforts of our extremely pleasant and professional waitress, we were just too ignorant. For the starter I managed to pick out the word “canard” which I recognised as duck, so I ordered that. My mate had spotted “thon” which he recognised as tuna, so he ordered that. For my main course I had ordered shoulder of lamb, and when I asked the waitress for a bottle of white wine to go along with it, she looked as though I had just asked to shit in her mouth. Still, she managed to say “good choice sir” through gritted teeth. Well fuck it, I don’t like red wine.

When our starter came, I began to wish I had stayed in the weird Mexican / cook your own sushi place. What I got was a plate of thinly sliced raw duck, with a bunch of rocket on top. And I don’t mean very rare duck, I mean raw. My mate gloated for a minute until his arrived, and he had a mush of diced raw tuna steak mixed with red peppers, drizzled with orange sauce, and brilliantly, with a dollop of ice-cream and a wafer on top. I almost pissed myself. My raw duck was pretty grim, and though I grimaced with the first few mouthfuls, I soon discovered that if I drowned it with balsamic vinegar and ate it with plenty of rocket, you couldn’t really taste the raw duck. Somehow I managed to finish it all. My mate had less luck with his weird raw fish and ice-cream combo, instead choosing to flatten it all and hid it under the rocket, so as “not to appear rude”. I didn’t really get that either. When the waitress returned and asked if there was something wrong with it, he informed her he didn’t eat it because he doesn’t like red peppers. I don’t know how he kept a straight face. The main courses made up for it, but the weird starters were still a hot topic of conversation the next day when we went into the city centre to get some lunch. In the centre of Geneva you expect to pay about 3 times more than you would in the suburbs for food, but we had expenses left to use, so we went to the restaurant attached to the Four Seasons hotel. After having our jackets taken and being seated we began to browse the menu, then wished we still had our jackets so we could do a runner again. There was a choice of 7 things on the menu, and they were quite ridiculously expensive. I opted for a club sandwich, which was the cheapest thing on the menu at £18, thinking I would get loads of other stuff on the side, along with a cup of coffee. My mate ordered veal at around £30, expecting some big veal steaks or chops, and had a couple of bottles of Swiss-German beer. When the food came, my club sandwich turned out to be simply a standard club sandwich, served with a few little bits of lettuce which I later discovered were covered in salt crystals and ended up being spat back into my napkin (it tasted like licking the sea). The £30 veal arrived for my ravenous mate, and ended up being………… thinly sliced raw veal served with rocket. Laugh? I nearly shat. After he picked away at a few forkfuls of veal, and I ate my sandwich and spat the salty salad into my napkin we called for our bill, and found that the Swiss-German beer that slimy head waiter had so kindly recommended to us cost £6 a bottle. And so, £60 lighter and still hungry, we left and vowed never to return. On the way home I stopped at the supermarket, bought a packet of frozen quarter pounders and some buns, got home and fried the fuckers good and proper, served with cheese slices and dripping with ketchup and oil. Pretentious French food can be interesting once in a while, but you can’t beat some good unhealthy British style cookery.

Song currently stuck in my head – “Untutored Youth” by The Hives.
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