I do stuff, all over. Like eating and drinking. This site will tell you what, where and when.
For my personal blog, go here, for a more tech-centric one go here.
I'm not much of a sweet stuff person, but once in a while I don't mind feasting on chocolate. Last week I was, by chance, the recipient of a piece of a freakishly huge bar of Toblerone.
It's a though one to eat, unless you go at it with a knife (which I won't, traumatized that one Seinfeld episode). But Toblerone, with its nut and honey filling, is still one of the best kinds of chocolate you can get. I suspect I will have finished it off sometime in July.
When it comes to Schnitzel or any other kind of meat, served either with potatoes or dumplings and lovingly called Viennese cuisine, there are a number places people swear serve the best food.
I am always wary, since my standards tend to be, despite their simplicity, harder to meet than others. What I want is a lot of food for not too much money. I know, I still think like a student, and in a way, I still am. Despite my huge paycheck. Anyway, the latest place I went to that served that Viennese cuisine was a place in the 17th district, called Lercherl von Hernals, where Lercherl is a diminutive of Lerche, and Lerche, you guessed it, means lark. Hernals, btw, is the proper name of the 17th district. As expected, the interior consists of heavy wooden chairs and tables, loads of ornamental woodwork and a waiter who looks like during the winter months he usually instructs people on how to ski. A ski-instructor, if you will. He was still quite the polite chap, though. I opted for a Zwiebelrostbraten, which is a slice of beef roast buried underneath loads of crispy onions, the whole thing, ideally swimming in a pool of gravy. Here's what it looks like:
Never mind the fact that you can't actually see the beef. It's buried under these loads of onions.While it was in fact quite a lot and very competitively priced, the beef was a bit on the stringy side. The upside to this is, that after all, I'm much more of a gourmand than I am a gourmet, so combined with generous gulps of their beer and total disregard for what a perfect piece of beef should be like, I absolutely enjoyed my visit to the Lercherl of Hernals. So if you want authentic Viennese cuisine that's not expensive and served in large quantities, do go there. As fair as I know, no bookings necessary.Comments [0]
International readers will most likely not be familiar with what I'm going to show you today. It's the Martinigansl, a goose traditionally eaten at Martinmas (Which is St.Martin's Day - read all about it here).
As most of the more intricate dishes lately, it was something served up by my parents.
It's basically roasted goose with a bread-stuffing, cooked red cabbage and dumplings, again made of white bread.
I'm in no way inclined to go into the details of the recipe, so just have a look at the pictures and enjoy.
For more pictures, especially close-up pictures of delicious poultry, visit the Flickr photoset.
Edit: Here's the set as a slideshow:
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While I am very much into cooking my own food, going out and enjoying what others have cooked up for my consumption is something I'm very fond of as well. Of course, it does cost the equivalent of money, so if you don't have any, home cooking might be a better solution for you.
If you do indeed have scraped together enough dough to be able to buy yourself some food and drink, here's a place you should visit: Augustin. Set in a rather shabby part in a rather shabby district of Vienna (well, it's true. It just isn't really pretty, that district), Augustin is a great surprise. Not only does its exterior work hard on betraying the splendid interiour, the food is also quite delicious and plentiful.
Decked out in Biedermeier sofas, chandeliers, sturdy wooden tables and loads of candles, Augustin is as cozy as it can get. The fact that almost every night there's a chap playing the piano, only adds to the undeniable charm of the place. Foodwise I opted for nothing less than a Bauernkotelett (farmer's cutlet), which consisted of tender grilled pork, covered in loads of roasted onions, with fried potatoes, little cubes of bacon and pole beans on the side:
The only problem with the cozy interior of Augustin is, that sitting on a sofa as soft as the one we sat on, means, that your food sits somewhere on eye level, which makes it a tad difficult to eat (having been confronted with that dire situation myself, here's a trick that actually works: simply sit on a chair for the duration of the meal!). Here's just a small thing I'd like for the owners to do. Update your website! While I think your Bauernkotelett was worth every single cent I paid for it, advertising your food roughly three Euros cheaper than it actually is, may be frowned upon by people less lenient than me! Anyway, I absolutely recommend going to Augustin, especially round eight, when the pianist will be playing one of his tunes, while you, stuffed with most exquisite Austrian foods, can recline on a sofa with cigarette in mouth and beer in hand. Augustin is located in the 15th district, Märzstraße 67, a three minute walk from the U3 station Johnstraße:Comments [0]
I am what you might call a big fan of roast pork. I am such a big fan that I regularly eat and make roast pork. I'm such a big fan, that I usually eat so much of it until I'm ready to burst (or puke, actually, but since puking is hardly something to write about in your food blog, I decided to stick with "burst"). And after dinner, I usually sneak into the kitchen and eat leftovers, because as we all know, for every little peace of roast pork not eaten, God kills a little kitten. And who would want that?
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And because I somewhat promised the last part, here's a picture of the best food we had during our stay on the island of Texel:
It's from a restaurant in De Koog, which name I didn't jot down, and even the mighty Google seems to have the restaurant positioned somewhere else than I remember it to be. Let's just say, it's the only Thai restaurant in De Koog and it's not in the grizzly Dorpsstraat. You'll find it. We were a bit worried because there were barely any people there, and wondered whether it's the fate of the restaurants that serve the most distinguished food on the island to perish due to their exotic nature. When we walked past the next day, an hour earlier than we'd been there the day before, we were happy to see that our fears were unfounded. The restaurant was packed. And with this rather happy ending I will conclude my Death By Martini Abroad specials. I hope you had a blast, I know I did. Dank u wel!
Absolutely related:
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It took a mere ten days, but here I am with yet another glorious update, namely Pt.II of my already epic feature on how to feed tourists. Where tourists are actually my girlfriend and I.
As you may remember from last time, there's not a whole lot that speaks for the cuisine of the Netherlands. Which, by the way, is not meant to be mean in any way. It's just the way it is. But they do make some mean fries.
And they've got these fantastic contraptions that hold your fries. Which makes for a great fries-eating-experience. 
Hell, who needs a refined cuisine, when you've got stuff like that? Apart from fries, Dutch cuisine also offers pancakes. I don't really care for pancakes, so I let my girlfriend sample an apple-pancake in the restaurant next to the lighthouse in the north of the isle of Texel (called "De Toren", which I think means "The Lighthouse", but it could mean all other kinds of things as well; I'm simply too lazy to find out). Anyway, I was told that the pancake was ok, but nothing to write home about. Which, when on vacation, is a bad thing, because it takes away yet another thing to write on all those postcards. (Disclaimer: I didn't send any postcards. So it wasn't just you who didn't get one, it was everyone!) Anyway, I think the picture of the pancake turned out quite nice though:
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When on vacation, people do two things: nothing and eating.
I had actually planned on writing a lengthy essay on the merits and the downsides of being at a place that specializes in feeding these hungry hoards, but after a few paragraphs I came to the conclusion that it would be far too rambling. So instead, here's a rundown of a few places we ate during our stay in the Netherlands:First of all there was Wagamama in Amsterdam. It's actually a Japanese chain, but I'd never been to one, so we sat and ate:
This is Yaki Udon, which contained all sorts of vegetables, chicken and prawns. I'd never before realized that Udon noodles taste a bit like potatoes. We also had a starter, which the good people at Wagama like to call a side dish:
Grilled asparagus. I must say, it sounded better on the menu. I guess I'm just not much of an asparagus man.On Texel, where tourist feeding places are abundant, we had our first dinner at a tex-mex-pizzaplace-asian mixture of a restaurant, aptly named Maxima Classic Grill Restaurant Argentina. The logical conclusion was for me to have an entrecôte: 
It wasn't the best steak I'd ever had, but hey, it was my vacation and it was meat, so I was happy. That's it for today. Come back tomorrow for more detailed stories on what to eat where and why on the isle of Texel.
Wagamama Restaurant Maxima Classic Grill Restaurant Argentina
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I know I promised to present to you today a sad but entertaining rundown of the ways tourists are fed in places popular with, well, tourists, but being the fickle person that I am, just can't be bothered today. So I'll post a picture of beer instead. Beer I had in Amsterdam!
More about that and some other most succulent stuff soon.
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Now, before I start venturing into the culinary delights of the Netherlands, and after having written about how good they are at importing stuff, I'm going to post a little disclaimer here. First off, the Netherlands are not a place with a rich unique cuisine. To be precise, there seem to be two things they like to attribute to their cuisine, and that's pancakes and fries. Everything else seems to be imported. So don't expect me writing about this or that Dutch specialty, because, well, there really aren't any.
With that out of the way, here's another thing I might add. They don't do coffee too well. The only read good coffee we had was at the Douwe Egbert's Cafe in Amsterdam.
My girlfriend opted for an apple pie, which I was told wasn't half bad either.
Since we only spent two nights in Amsterdam and the café was so close to our Hotel, we went there not just once, but twice. The next day my stomach needed something a bit more hearty, so I had a grilled ham and cheese sandwich: 
With the cheese molten to perfection, I was what you may call a happy camper, only that I didn't really camp, but, well, stayed at a hotel. I do feel a bit bad for not venturing much further into town on the lookout for a less chainesque café, but on the other hand, it was my vacation, so give it a rest already.Come back tomorrow for a sad but entertaining look at the one-size-fits-all cuisine of tourist locations.
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