Amadeus Viennese Restaurant
111 Richmond St. W. 416-366-3500. Dinner for two with beer, tax and tip, $90.
We are channelling Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music. He is a beautiful baritone in lederhosen, she is a dirndl-clad fraulein in sturdy stockings yodelling: "The hills are alive with the sound of music . . . Doh, a deer, a female deer . . . I am 16 going on 17" . . . and of course: "Cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels,/ Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles. . ."
Yes, these are a few of my favourite things. Which is why a visit to Amadeus Viennese Restaurant (despite its almost painful un-coolness) is in order for lovers of heavy middle-European food; and particularly in order now because they're celebrating Octoberfest till Oct. 17.
Austrian food is the bad-for-you cuisine that I find irresistible. Go to an Austrian café and they'll offer you everything mit schlag (with whipped cream), which is my idea of heaven. Wienerschnitzel, perhaps their national dish, combines three of my personal best forbidden fruits: veal, breading and deep frying. Then there are the Austrian dumplings and noodles, oft drenched in meat juice, for which I sigh.
Amadeus is a humungous cavern of a restaurant with three different spaces: a white-tablecloth room with a fancy menu, a café doing takeout and, of course, the beer stube (a.k.a. beer 'n' bratwurst hall). This is where it's all happening for the next few days while they celebrate Octoberfest. Frauleins come to take your order while the oompahpah band plays. But where, oh where, is Plummer and his juicy baritone?
They're singing Roll out the Barrel, and the gang's all here, downing beers from the capacious beer menu (no wine on visible offer) sitting at long communal tables covered with tablecloths bearing the logo of the Paulaner beer company. The beer coasters say (translated from the French): "Germans have no sense of humour. . . An empty beer glass never made anybody laugh."
Prosit. Skol. L'chaim. Pass the herring and bratwurst, both of which are superb. The herring is more delicate, less sugary, more tender than any herring I can buy. The bratwurst is robust, yet delicate, and splendidly served with hot mustard, house-made piquant sauerkraut flecked with bacon, and potato salad.
About the potato salad: I was taught kartoffel salat by a good German cook, who was very particular about tossing just-boiled spuds with just enough white wine and white wine vinegar to coat. Although this rendition has good vinegary flavour and is nicely topped with shredded radishes, it's drowning in dressing, which is not appealing. On the other hand, the house-made pretzel that comes with the Bavarian white veal sausage is soft and savoury, quite possibly the best pretzel I've met outside southern Germany. The white veal sausage is competent though not earth-shattering.
Among other starters, I am enchanted by the goulash soup, which is rich beef broth sparked with sweet Hungarian paprika, afloat with small chunks of tender beef and tiny potato cubes. Dunk the proffered rye bread in the goulash soup and who needs a main course?
Especially when the main courses are, putting it kindly, not exactly a walk on the light side. Marinated pork hock is, according to the menu "slowly roasted." But they don't say for how long. It's horribly overcooked and dried out, and the accompanying dumpling is a large ugly ball that has a) no taste and b) the texture of yesterday's oatmeal porridge. The wienerschnitzel is made with veal, but the meat is tough and darkish and its breading not as crispy as one would have hoped. Beef goulash reprises the sweet/piquant paprika scent of the goulash soup, but its accompanying spatzle are a terrible disappointment.
I have a strong personal relationship with spatzle. They are tiny thread-like noodles that are made fresh by scraping noodle dough off a special small board into boiling water, and then eaten perhaps dabbed with a tiny bit of butter. Good spatzle are gossamer, like good gnocchi -- and ghastly when heavy or gummy. These spatzle need salt and are sticking together -- not exactly the fragile fresh noodles of my dreams.
Austria very much marches on its belly. In my youth, I whiled away many happy afternoons in Austrian cafés, which offered something they called "tea dancing." I could never figure out why they called it that, since: 1) everyone drank coffee or hot chocolate with mountains of schlag, and 2) dancing was not on anyone's mind. We went to the cafés to eat cake, and lots of it. Viennese tortes are justly renowned for their many-layered, cream-filled complexities.
Amadeus bakes credible cakes: Their black forest cherry cake, the queen of Bavarian sweets, is correctly made with sour cherries and scads of whipped cream. Their linzertorte, which Austrians say is the oldest cake in the world, is a dense, chewy and wonderful almond cake with raspberry jam at its heart.
When dinner ends and we wish for a crane to haul us to our feet so that we can waddle homeward, the band is playing a beer barrel polka. Care to dance?