We enjoyed too many places in the recent trip through Austria to review them all. But if I am asked which I’d be most eager to return to, one stands at the top of the list: the country inn Steirereck am Pogusch. We spent two nights there and it wasn’t nearly enough.
I’ll get around to discussing the food but, let me first describe the environment the Reitbauer family has created there. The heart of the property is the Wirtshaus.
In the English language, there are inns and innkeepers. In German, Wirt means not the building but its host. So Wirtshaus means the host’s house. Emphasis is given to the person, not the structure. This is abundantly apparent throughout the entire Pogusch property. Every detail reflects the taste of this family, refined yet lighthearted.
The Austrian country charm of the original building has been lovingly maintained, but when they wanted more space, they attached a modern wing that makes the statement, we appreciate equally the architecture of the 21st century and the homey comfort of the 19th.
We were lucky to find a room here. It had been booked solid for several months before we wanted to come. When we had lunch in the family’s Vienna city restaurant, Steirereck am Stadtpark, I mentioned to our server that we were sad not to be able to visit their country place. “Let me see what I can do,” she replied. A few minutes later, she came back to report that she had managed to get us a room. I happily put it down in my calendar. More about that “room” later…
You enter the Wirtshaus through this inviting entryway:
The happy coexistence of old and new continues throughout the dining rooms:
The property is first and foremost a farm. In addition to the cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens, they raise over 500 varieties of fruits, vegetables and herbs. This produce becomes the heart of the menu both here at Pogusch and at their more formal restaurant in Vienna. “Farm to table” and “sustainable” have become clichés, but here both are entirely genuine.
Throughout the property are clusters of dwelling units, each with a unique personality. They all manage to be homey, quirky, and elegant, displaying the family’s distinctive taste.
We stayed in one of the four Vogelhäuser (bird houses). Each is named for a kind of bird. Ours was called Kuckuck, or cuckoo. I have to describe a few of its features to give you a glimpse of what makes the whole place so special. The bird houses sit on a hill with a view that stretches for miles across the green Styrian countryside. Entering the birdhouse hill, you’re greeted by this sign:
Only for Nesthocker. What are Nesthockers? It’s a play on words, meaning nest-sitters. It means baby birds that stay for a long time in the nest and also means stay-at-home people. Any people lucky enough to stay in these bird houses are going to want to stay there as long as they can.
Wrap-around decks look out over endless hay meadows cut into the forested mountainsides.
When you enter the front door, a quiet recording of bird and insect songs plays. After a moment, you hear the call of a cuckoo. Inside, the juxtaposition of old and new continues, exemplified by this stainless steel woodburning stove.
The bathroom includes a sauna and both indoor and outdoor showers.
On a wall of the toilet enclosure is this depiction of nursery rhymes about cuckoos. The cuckoo theme extends even to bath towels embossed with a cuckoo.
The bird houses are just one group of accommodations. Each group is unique. The Baumhäuser, or tree houses are clustered in a wooded grove.
In the Glasshaus, guests have suites within the farm’s greenhouses.
One of the old barns has been converted to guest rooms, called Schlaffen im Stall (sleep in the stable.)
Within the woods and among the farm buildings are the Jagdhütte, Rehleinhütte and other guest accommodations, each utterly charming, and each possessing understated luxury.
Two of the Reitbauer’s young adult children were managing the dining room during our stay. They clearly regarded their time there as not merely a job, but something more akin to a party that they loved hosting. I told the son how much we were enjoying the Kuckuck house. “Well, you can thank my grandparents for that. Every stick of it was theirs.” He shared an honest openness about how he saw his future. “My parents told me I could do anything I want, be a doctor or anything I liked. But I love it right here. In this business, your work is your life. You’re giving your guests not just food but an experience that you hope will touch them deeply. In what other job could I do that?”
I turned out to be one of the guests who was touched deeply. During my time at Pogusch, I thought a lot about why I care about restaurant meals. The young Reitbauer’s statement about sharing not just food but meaningful experiences captured what makes me spend ridiculous amounts of time and money roaming around looking for places to eat. The food has to be good, of course. But there’s much more to it. My favorite chefs are trying to share something that transcends the food: fond childhood memories, cultural traditions they fear may vanish, or surprising sensory nuances. There’s an intimacy in this process that moves me.
The Reitbauers have come upon a formula that combines features of traditional a la carte dining with the modern multicourse menu. They serve breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week. Most of the guests are here for a stay of several days, and the Wirt needs to provide them different experiences each meal. Here’s how they do it.
The main dining room serves completely different a la carte offerings each day, Wednesday to Saturday.
Wednesday’s menu is titled “Garden—field—woods.” It’s not entirely plant-based, but it gives vegetables first place. Here’s an excerpt from Wednesday’s menu:
Vegetables are incredibly diverse. They smell and taste green or fruity,
from sweet to sour, from bitter to savory.
They can be crunchy or velvety, juicy or creamy,
they can be cooling, stinging, or sweetly indulgent.
Vegetables are a delight for all the senses.
- Leek Hearts
Grilled leek hearts with salted carrots, pickled mushrooms,
crispy linseed & herb salad. - Baby Carrots
Glazed carrot variety with marinated herbs from our kitchen garden. - Fennel
Braised with Pogusch citrus, Pernod & coriander seeds & fennel greens. - Eggplant
Braised & spicy glazed eggplant with brook cress & Meyer lemon. - Sweet Potatoes
Oven-baked in their skins with spicy paprika-chupetinho chutney. - Chickpeas
Baked chickpea pastry with mountain cheese. - Vegetable Salad & Buddha’s Hand
Marinated & pickled vegetable variety with Pogusch Buddha’s Hand citrus.
All sorts of things from Styrian gardens
Then, as on each of the four days of menus, there are two other pages of choices, one called Authentic, Trusted, and the other Refined, Simple. They list traditional Styrian specialties updated with the kitchen’s unique insights, and the chef’s selected preparations of lamb, veal, chicken and pork from the farm and fish from nearby mountain lakes.
Not to overwhelm you with the rest of the menus, I’ll just say that Thursday features “Inner Values,” snout to tail items from their lamb, pork and veal, Friday is “Freshwater fish day,” with whatever was just caught in the nearby lakes and streams, and Saturday is devoted to Styrian veal.
On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, lunch and dinner are set four-course menus based on the best the farm has provided those days.
Here was our dinner on Monday:
As an amuse bouche, they brought this board of Pogusch pork, pointed peppers and horseradish, each of which they grew.
Each of the four courses was simple and perfect. Vegetables in Aspic contained rungia klossi, a green with a pronounced mushroom flavor. We could see from our walks in the nearby woods that mushrooms were nearing the end of their season. No doubt that was why the mushrooms in the dish were marinated rather than fresh.
The kitchen makes great use of the tremendous variety of mushrooms that grow in their property and the surrounding forest. Have a look at this display in the breakfast room, each jar containing a different species of locally foraged mushroom. The letters spell out “a remembrance of the diversity”
Styrian sour cream soup with marinated and smoked salmon was a delight.
Pogusch pork was from one of their own pigs, accompanied by kohlrabi, green beans and braised romaine, each of which they grew. The terrific sauce was flavored with herbs they also grew.
Nasturtiums, both as flowers and leaves, were a nice piquant accompaniment to the perfectly roasted potatoes.
The Steirereck Pogusch team cultivates dozens of varieties of potatoes, looking for the best for each method of cooking. I don’t know which one they chose for roasting in this dish, but they were delicious.
This potato plot was just beside the drive leading to our bird house. Each sign marks a row of a different variety of potato.
Poppy seeds and cheese curds inside a delicate beignet accompanied marinated and braised apricots from their orchard, vanilla ice cream and lemon verbena. I could eat this dessert every day and never grow tired of it. Come to think of it, I wish I had it right now.
Espresso came with candied citrus rind and sugared roasted pumpkin seeds. These seeds are an indispensable ingredient in Styrian cooking. They can flavor eggs at breakfast, mignardise like this one, and everything in between.
Tuesday’s dinner was entirely different and no less enjoyable.
I neglected to photograph the first dish, kohlrabi, veal tartar with wild herbs.
The rustic potato vegetable soup was everything you could hope such a dish would be: warming, comforting, rich and flavorful. Grandma would have highly approved.
Schneebergland duck came with cabbage, celeriac polenta and lettuce. Schneeberg is a nearby small mountain. The duck combined all the qualities one hopes to experience in duck but most often doesn’t: crispy skin, tender meat, satisfying duck flavor. The rich sauce was excellent with both the duck and the tasty celriac polenta. The lettuce doesn’t look like much, but it was outstanding.
Before I remembered to photograph it, we gobbled up half of the tasty peach and semolina kaiserschmarrn, the classic Austrian countryside dessert, named for Emperor Franz Joseph I who supposedly loved it.
There’s also the option of eating at the bar in the kitchen. There you can order from an ever-changing a la carte menu, or else opt to “let it flow,” meaning trusting the chefs to give you a succession of courses of their choosing. Here’s how they describe the kitchen bar:
The most fun is always to be had at the bar! This is true of our Schankkuchl too. At the heart of the action you sit at the long bar in a cozy and convivial atmosphere with your fellow guests and observe as the chefs prepare your dishes over the open fire or steam them in front of you. In the show kitchen the bounty of our farm and the region receives a contemporary and delicate interpretation.
We didn’t get to experience the kitchen bar but would love to when we return. Here are some tempting excerpts from the bar menu. The coexistence of old and new is in full force here:
- Devil’s roll winter edition
Sourdough, stracciatella, wild broccoli, bacon, mushroom, kimchi. - Kissed by fire
Pogusch lamb, viennese garnish, pogusch heurige. - Bear strong
Bear & fruits, sorrel, salted caramel. - Loafing around
Liwanzen (yeast pancakes), wild fruits, apple plum, soured cream - The best of both worlds
Sour vegetable salad, short rib, coriander, mustard. - Bikini figure snack board
Autumn vegetables, sheep’s milk cheese, barberry, nettle. - Chick stickx
Hen, romanesco, mountain pine cones, curry leaf, lemon balm - King or beggar
Carp, pumpkin, sea buckthorn, spinach, basil. - Overflyer
Young pogusch chicken, roasted onions, chanterelle mushrooms, meyer lemon. - Valhalla
Catfish, kohlrabi, horseradish, variety of beets, vanilla. - Pearls before swine
Jerusalem artichoke, quinoa, farmers’ caviar, chives.
LET IT FLOW__________________________________ min–max _110-155
We came to Pogusch in search of alternatives to the tasting menu format that Michelin seems to consider the only thing worthy of multiple stars. I was feeling tired of dozens of tiny complicated dishes, each with a sip of a different wine. I was tired of those pock-marked white plates with the tiny depression in the center for two bites of food. I had no more patience for kitchens whose most commonly used implement is the tweezers.
Michelin reviewers, if you’re reading this, ask yourself: how soon and how often would you like to return for dinner to any particular one of your three-star places? For me, the answer in almost all cases would be not for at least a month and maybe two or three times a year. After you enjoyed a dinner in such a place, would you like to come back the next day? For me, the answer would almost always be no.
For Steirereck Pogusch, in contrast, my answer would be that I’d like to come back not only the next day but every day for the next week. Isn’t that worth some stars?
As Robert Brown so cogently pointed out in his article Form Swallows Function, the tasting menu is to the advantage of the restaurant and the detriment of its guests. It allows the kitchen to crank out the appearance of variety with assembly-line monotony. It allows them to reduce waste by knowing that every customer is going to eat the same thing. Almost every restaurant that has or aspires to Michelin stars has fallen into line with this format.
At Pogusch, the Reitbauers have evolved an excellent alternative that I hope will inspire others to emulate it. The pendulum of gastronomic fashion has swung as far as it can toward tasting menus. I’d like to propose Steirereck am Pogusch as a model of what it can swing back to: a dining experience that combines best features of the past and the present. I’m eagerly looking forward to another visit there and hope it will be soon.
