Am I ungrateful, I wonder, to write anything but an unqualified rave review of Juan Amador’s Vienna restaurant? It was, after all, the first restaurant in all of Austria to receive three Michelin stars, and it held them alone for over a decade until Steirereck came along.
Michelin stars are indispensable to the financial success of a high-quality restaurant, so it is understandable that a savvy chef must try to create what the Michelin reviewers want to see. Social media too plays a role in the viability of top restaurants, so it is likewise understandable that chefs aiming to draw in affluent and discerning diners must pay attention to what works there.
Both of these things are, sadly for me, at odds with what makes a restaurant enjoyable. The thing I value most is simple: the food has to be delicious. Instagram cannot depict how the food tastes. It can only show what it looks like. Michelin seems to value the cleverness of a chef in crafting unique and original compositions of ingredients more than it cares about how pleasurable it is to eat the food.
Juan Amador is a chef of the highest level of skill and creativity. You can almost hear how the gears turn in his mind when you are presented with one of his dishes. They are clever. Original. Ingenious. So much so that how they taste seems to come second in importance. It’s not that they aren’t enjoyable. Most of them certainly are. But I am left with the impression that he is hoping diners will say, “Oh, that’s so clever,” rather than, “That was delicious.”
Amador sits in a brick lined former wine cellar that was originally a part of Vienna’s underground water infrastructure.
The sole dinner option is the tasting menu. Here it is:
The first snacks are good examples of what I mean by prioritizing cleverness over taste.
The Viennese Tafelspitz 2.0 is meant to convey the essence of that dish in two mouthfuls. The spoon, shown for scale, is miniature, maybe a centimeter across. The soup is a very reduced beef broth over one star-shaped wafer each of carrot and potato. The roule is filled with beef tartare and topped with horseradish. Is the dish perfectly crafted? Yes. Is it better in any way than tafelspitz? Not really.
The next bite is called Walk in a Forest. I’ve had similarly titled dishes elsewhere, for example at Manresa, that were enjoyable compositions of vegetables, each carefully selected for excellence, individually prepared and combined into a composition in which each bite gave a distinct pleasure. This was nothing of that sort. The whole thing is one small mouthful, apparently sculpted with tweezers and a magnifying glass: an impressive miniature, but not especially enjoyable to eat.
I could go on in a similar vein about the rest of the snacks, but in fairness to chef Amador, each was masterfully prepared. Here are pictures of each:
As an add-on, I ordered this composition, highly recommended by the server: oysters, caviar, beurre blanc ice cream, almond milk foam, tamarind oil. Each component was perfect. The idea of making ice cream out of beurre blanc is original, but did I enjoy it more than I would have a mouthful of excellent vanilla ice cream? Not really.
The bread and butter were delicious and, frankly a relief from the preciousness of the starters. The olive oil is a special cuvee made exclusively for Amador, and truly outstanding. The spread is made from buffalo milk with lovage oil. It was excellent.
Was I unfair in my criticism of the first dishes? Each showed the highest levels of craftmanship and creativity. But thinking it over, I stand by what I said. The chef prioritizes cleverness over pleasure. This was foreshadowed by the architectural style sketches of some dishes that are displayed in the entrance way. Here are a couple of them:
A server noticed me looking at them and came over to discuss them. “Yes,” he said proudly, “Chef has a clever and original concept for each dish he creates.”
Moving onto the main dishes, presented in a sequence Amador calls Momentum, I will try to be more balanced in my critiques.
The carabineiro with ajo blanco (a cold Andalusian soup that predates gazpacho) was an unqualified success. The prawn was an outstanding example of its species—exquisitely fresh and flavorful and cooked the exact right amount. The soup and the slight crunch of the green almonds complimented it nicely.
The Patagonian toothfish was flaky and sublimely tender, and the “escabeche,” really just a single ingredient (perhaps a slice of summer squash) stand-in for that complex preparation, the leek oil and the hazelnut foam underscored the fish beautifully. The percebes, however, did not do justice to how delicious those barnacles can be. In an attempt to pare them down to a simple bite, the flavor and texture that makes them so sought-after were mostly lost. Again, the tendency to favor cleverness over taste showed itself.
The turbot from Brittany, salted Wachau apricot, porcini and sweetbread was excellent. The sauce, which was a surprising Jerusalem artichoke foam, provided a subtle nuttiness that unified the perfection of each of the ingredients. I found no fault with this delicious dish.
Parfum de Siam was an excellent venison dish, so titled for the green Thai curry flavored sauce. The cauliflower foam, puree and wafer were masterful. Altogether a great composition.
The first dessert, Strawberry Fields Forever, is described as containing two varieties of strawberry, Mieze Schindler and Mara des Bois. Both are famed as exceptionally flavorful and delicate. I would guess the former were used in the rosé champagne ice while the latter were served whole.
The second dessert, pêche melba, was a deconstructed version of Escoffier’s classic. It was certainly enjoyable, but I didn’t think it improved upon the original.
We were now more than four hours into this odyssey and I was happy to see that the mignardises, which Amador calls pequenas loquras, arrived all together rather than one after another. They were tasty and, though I hesitate to reuse the word, clever.
My experience at Amador left me mildly exasperated and craving the excellence of simplicity. Is there any place these days that provides that? Happily, our journey took us next to two places that did: Taubenkobel in the tiny Styrian village of Schützen am Gebirge, and Steirereck am Pogusch, the country outpost of the owners of Steirereck am Stadtpark, which I previously described as a strong candidate for the best restaurant in Austria. My meal at Amador, Austria’s only other Michelin three star, made me feel more certain that Steirereck deserves that title. I will review Taubenkobel and Pogusch soon.
