By John Mariani

    As I write this, there are still six inches of snow on the ground in New York, but when you read this, the wildflowers may well be bursting from the rich soil of Burgenland in southeastern, Austria, and the grape vines getting ready to bud.
    I shall be writing about Austrian wines in another column (below), but I could ignore them entirely and still convince you that Burgenland, about an hour from Vienna and bordering on Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia, is well worth visiting for its natural beauty alone.  This is not an area dotted with little Hansel-and-Gretel-style cottages, for the Burgenlanders are a practical people who live in minimally decorated, comfortable stucco homes.  But it is rich as a place where dwell hundreds of species of birds and indigenous breeds of cattle that include the longhorn Graurinder (gray cattle), white donkeys, water buffalo, and Mangalitza pigs famous for their delicately flavored meat.
    Watered and fed by Lake Neusiedl (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) in the eastern parts of the Alps, the region is home to six nature parks, including the huge National Park, founded in 1993. Indeed, the park is prime bird-watching territory, and people are more likely to be seen on their bikes or hiking through the marshes than driving cars. The birds range from the great gray shrike (Raubwürger) and short-eared owl (Sumpfohreule) to the red-tailed phalarope (Odenshühnchen) and the imperial eagle (Kaiseradler).
    My wife and I visited Burgenland last autumn, when most of the foliage and harvesting had taken place, so we contented ourselves with visiting the towns, restaurants, and one very special castle in the region.  On our first day, we visited the small lakeside village of Gols, now famous for its exceptionally well done Weinkulturhaus (Wine Culture House), which not only stocks more than 400 Austrian wines (above) but has a beautifully lighted stone wine cellar to visit. 
        Afterwards we sat down for lunch at nearby Restaurant Varga, whose sign reads “FISCH” in big letters, and whose ingredients come straight from the lake each day. Only 14 fishermen are allowed to work in the lake, and Varga has its own, most of whom use nets and traps, not hooks.
        Varga’s interior is old-fashioned Austrian décor, with heavy wood and heavy antiques, but come spring the outside tables are where you want to dine in the sunshine. The menu, on any given day, will be rich with zander (walleye pike), perhaps with eggplant and pumpkin puree; wels (catfish) with tomato, zucchini, potato dumpling and bacon (right); or hecht (pike), simply sautéed with boiled buttered potatoes.  Drink the restaurant’s own wine, name Zummitnehmen.  Prices are according to availability of the fish.
    After lunch we visited the remarkable Dorf Museum, a labor of love crafted almost singlehandedly by Christine and Josef Haubenwallner as homage to the farming heritage of the great plain. It is a kind of amiable ghost town lined with small houses, a schoolroom, grocer’s shop, post office, craftsmen’s shops, bakery, even an old cinema, all reclaimed from a century of village life now largely vanished.
    That evening we stayed on the grounds of the extraordinarily baroque Schloss Halbturn Castle (below), built in 1711 as a hunting lodge for Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who gave it to his daughter, Empress Maria Theresa of the Hapsburg Dynasty.  Today it is a museum with a small hotel owned and cared for by the very cordial Waldbott-Bassenheim family, which also oversees the vast Markus Count of Koenigsegg winery, well known for its Pinot Noirs.
    The castle is home to a superb collection of furniture, as well as a glorious 1765 ceiling fresco “Allegory of Time and Light” by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, given as  a wedding present for Archduchess Marie Christine. The rooms are ideal as galleries for the highly popular seasonal art exhibits, concerts, and garden parties, including an annual visit from Vienna’s famed Lipizzaner stallions.
    The hotel's guest rooms, located in a building across the courtyard, have all been refurbished in a very minimalist, modern style--ours in a riot of bright orange colors.  Down the winding staircase is a wholly charming dining room, Restaurant Wieser (below), with wooden booths and beautifully set, candlelit tables where we enjoyed hearty autumnal fare that included that wonderful Mangalitza pork scented with rosemary (€12.80),  and chicken paprika with housemade noodles and sauerkraut (€9.80). Complete meals range from €18 to €25, or you can order à la carte. Lingering here over coffee and candlelight gave us a sense that Burgenland can seem as remote and removed from Vienna as Capri is from Naples. 
    The next morning we drove to Burgenland’s largest town, Eisenstadt (Iron City), actually a small city of just 13,000 residents, its center dominated by the  magnificent Esterhazy Palace (below), once owned by one of the richest of the Hapsburg families and now wholly restored to 19^th century grandeur, with several floors of superb and opulent furniture befitting the family’s station.  There is also a grand music hall with impeccable acoustics, where many of Haydn’s works were first performed.
    We had a really splendid lunch at one of the town’s finest, most modern restaurants, Henrici, located within the palace’s former royal stables, with a menu featuring foods cooked on a lava stone grill, like juicy suckling pig and crispy potatoes.  The interior, reached through glass doors, has high, barrel-shaped ceilings, and fine modern tables, chairs and a counter, all lighted by brightly colored, glowing lamps.         
    We began with goose liver with apple-poppyseed chutney (€15) and herb- marinated lake trout with roe, with an avocado potato salad and Mangalitza bacon (€13), and a dish of marinated, fried cep mushrooms with a chervil cream (€14).
  Our main courses included a dead ringer for Southern fried chicken (€16), here served with potato and corn lettuce, and sliced filet of beef, which came with herbed dumplings (€19). We  finished our meal with curd cheese dumplings and stewed plums (below) and a lovely chestnut cake with red wine pear and plum jam sorbet.   

    That evening we dined at a very new restaurant with an even more modern look and menu--Zur Blauen Ganz (Blue Goose), whose owner, Peter Szigeti, is also proprietor of one of the region’s most forward-looking wineries, Szigeti (see article on Burgenland wines below).   There are two dining rooms here, both brightly lighted and therefore very convivial, and the menu ranges far and wide for its effects while still using Burgenland’s products as much as possible.  Thus, we enjoyed dim sum with black pudding and sauerkraut as well as foie gras with plums and brioche (€15); there was sushi with polenta (€13), and carpaccio with apple and horseradish (€9). One of the best dishes was a white zucchini soup with burrata cheese and roast beef and black olives served on the side (€8.50).      Grilled wild shrimp with romaine lettuce and kohlrabi (€19) was simple and perfect, and the cold autumn air was kept at bay by a gutsy gulasch soup with black caraway and garlic (€6.50). There was also a traditional form of Tafelspitz--boiled beef with Sardinian fregola (€20).
    Desserts (left) were sumptuous—mango and coffee with hazelnut crisp (€8), and a rich chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream (€7).
    One of the few towns in Burgenland that probably concurs with tourists' expectations of quaintness is Rust (below), granted "free state" status by the Holy Roman Emperor, whose broad streets end at the waterline and whose chimneys are famous perches for storks (right). 
     The Austrian Wine Academy is also located in the city, which is surrounded by vineyards that produce its principal income and its most famous sweet wine, Ruster Ausbruch. The main streets are mostly off limits to cars, and charming shops line the few blocks of the center. You walk through Rust at a slow pace, through archways, past the town hall and the Gothic Fischerkirche church.  The wine taverns, called Bushenshanken, are gregarious gathering places. Most buildings date back to the 16th through 19th centuries, with mildly baroque façades mounted with royal heraldic decorations.  It's a storybook village, home to only 300 or so citizens, and for its beauty is actually protected by the Hague Convention for the protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which one hopes will keep Rust from ever changing.  Once at the gates, the barbarians will be asked to leave. . . politely.

NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani
Photos: Evan Sung

RACINES NY

94 Chambers Street (off Broadway)

212-227-3400
http://www.racinesny.com

      Translations of French into English can be awkward when it comes to restaurants, like those failed attempts opened by celebrated absentee chefs Alain Ducasse, Louis Outhier, Jacues Maximin, and Claude Baills.  One enchanting exception is Racines, the year-old offshoot of two Paris wine-centered restaurants of the same name (on Rue de l’Arbre Sec and Passage des Panoramas).
   The décor of the NYC branch evokes those of its predecessors, and the style of cooking is fresh, modern and wholly personalized, in this case by Chef Frédéric Duca (below), a native of Marseilles, who’s worked at top restaurants like Le Martinez in Cannes and Hélène Darroze in Paris, receiving his own  Michelin star at his restaurant L'Instant d'Or in Paris in 2013.
    Racines NY does not call itself a wine bar, but partner David Lillie, owner of Chambers Street Wines, and owner/sommelier Arnaud Tronche’s cache of ever-changing natural, organic and biodynamic wines underpins the thrust of the little Tribeca restaurant, with two cellars stocked with more than 800 labels, 9,000 bottles, and 40 reds and whites available by the glass (starting at $9).  Indeed, the restaurant’s name does not refer to the French neo-classical dramatist Jean Racine but to winemaker Claude Courtois’s signature “Racines” blend.
        The slip of a dining room is not unlike many in the neighborhood--a mix of white subway tiles, wooden floors and tables, exposed brick and duct work, and hanging lamps, with a small open kitchen, with marble counter for four people, where Mr. Duca and his staff work their magic.  Photos of French vintners dot the walls. It’s a pretty place, unpretentious and convivial, and somehow the noise level is not too high, given the soft surfaces here. My wife and I talked our heads off amiably all night.
        You may dine at the bar on charcuterie and small bites, but the menu in the main part of the room is where you’ll discover just how inventive Mr. Duca can afford to be, largely because his techniques are so indelibly grounded in the principles of traditional French cuisine.  Thus, a dish of sautéed snails are as French as you’d ever wish, with watercress and roasted garlic accompanied by saffron potato croquette ($12).  Sea scallops are flash sautéed and served with sunchokes, hazelnut, juniper and orange ($35), and in his rendering of a perfectly steamed egg with polenta, Comté cheese, and a lush foie gras sauce ($12, with black truffles $20 supplement) you taste just how precise his cooking is, with every element in elegant balance.
        Squid is velvety, sided with chickpeas, tangy preserved lemon and an olive vinaigrette ($12), evoking Mr. Duca’s Mediterranean roots, and he does an impeccable fregola sarda risotto ($19), rich and buttery, tender and aromatic.
        It is often argued that a chef shows his true talent in simply roasting a chicken, which, frankly, is not all that difficult these days, if you begin with a full-flavored chicken. Where Mr. Duca shows his spark is in cooking the chicken to bring out those essential and to serve it with complementary black trumpet mushrooms, salsify and an “oxy” sauce, based on a chicken stock enriched with a slightly oxidized white Roussillon  Grenache ($29).
        There is, of course, a fine cheese plate ($18), and, as throughout the meal, Mr. Tronche is here to match the perfect wine to his and your liking, such as the 2012 Camin Larreyda Costat Darrèr from Jurançon he proposed the night I dined there.
        Desserts ($11) all provide the same kind of simple, straightforward delectations, from a coffee parfait with candied orange, mint and chocolate sauce to a chocolate and caramel tart and a pommes Tatin with cinnamon crème anglaise and madeliene cookie.  Nothing fancy, just delicious.
        Mr. Duca is not trying to dazzle his guests, and that is his most admirable virtue. Instead of over-thinking dishes and listing too many of them for such a small kitchen, he instead focuses with a laser’s intensity on every element of each dish--its texture, the correct temperature, when to add other ingredients, how to season.  “Lovingly prepared” and “cooking from the heart” are clichés in culinary writing, but to say that the cuisine of Mr. Duca is so definably his is to pay him the highest praise.
        I suspect that if I lived in Tribeca, I would be at Racines once a week, especially on those nights when I just wanted a very good meal with very nice people serving very good wines.  Racines is a restaurant to cherish.
 
Open Mon.-Sat. for dinner. The $75 five-course menu is a terrific bargain.

❖❖❖

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
By John Mariani
  

THE WINES OF BURGENLAND, AUSTRIA 

    Of all the regions of Austria that grow wine grapes—Wachau, Kremstal, Kamptal, Donauland, and others—the most exciting innovations are coming out of Burgenland for wines at the Qualitätswein level as set by the Austrian Wine Marketing Board, created in 1986.  On a recent visit I was amazed at the breadth of varietals from the vineyards of this southeastern region, In fact, the Weinkulturhaus in Gols carries more than 400 labels, all from Burgenland, which now has its own Wein Burgenland marketing association.
    Wine has been made in Austria for 4,000 years, and at one time it was the third largest producer in the world; now it is sixteenth.  Vineyards devastated by phylloxera in the 19^th century were replanted with poor quality grape vines, and by the 1980s much of its production was sold in bulk, which led to a few unscrupulous wineries trying to bolster flavor by adding minute amounts of anti-freeze-like diethylene glycol, which caused an international scandal and long-lasting reaction against all Austrian wines.
    Since then, younger wineries, especially in Burgenland, have been working hard to make quality wines on a global level, and the new wine laws and adherence to EU standards have helped enormously. Winemakers also have eschewed the antiquated German Fraktur font from their labels, done away with the German term Spätburgunder for Pinot Noir, and moved beyond the favored Müller-Thurgau and Sylvaner white varietals once promoted for export. While visiting Burgenland last fall, I drank its wines while in the region, and found them well represented in the best restaurants in Vienna.  “Red wine culture only really began in Burgenland around 1986,” the managing director of Wein Burgenland, Christian Zechmeister, told me over lunch in the city of Eisenstadt. “About 30% of the wines are red, made from Blaufränkisch (above), Zweigelt, Blauberger, Pinot Noir, St. Laurent, and others, and they are all being pioneered by young winemakers.”
     Blaufränkisch (called Lemberger in Germany and Kekfrankos in Hungary) means “blue Frank,” referring to the grape’s color and the Franks who established an empire in the middle ages. In Viennese dialect, as in English, “frank” also suggests something honest, and there is nothing flamboyant, overoaked, overripe or flabby about these wines. A late-ripening varietal, its good acidity keeps the fruitiness in check. Occasionally a bit of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Zweigelt may be mixed in.
  
   One of the most innovative wineries in the area is Szgeti, whose owner Peter Szgeti, makes a wine variety of Burgenland wines and is especially known for his sparkling wines made from Grüner Veltliner and Welschriesling, made in a dry, brut style.  Szgeti also makes a prestige brut blend of 60% chardonnay and 40% blanc de blancs by the French champenoise method, which I found did indeed compare with very good Champagne.  Yet his sparklers never rise to the extravagant prices of French competitors:  Brut Grand Reserve is only 38 euros, his Grüners about 20.
    I was, however, most impressed by the Austrian red wines I tasted, for I’d never had much interest in them before and very little at all with those from Burgenland. I had a splendid wine named Juris (George) from Gols, made from the often finicky St. Laurent grape, related to Pinot Noir, but with more body and concentration.  It’s a varietal Burgenland vintners are banking on to find an international audience.
    Blaufränkisch is already in the vanguard, as shown by a delicious 2013 from Weingut Ernst Triebaumer, which is also experimenting with blends of the varietal with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.
    I was even impressed by several Grüner Veltliners I tried—a varietal I’ve always found bland at best. The 2013 Esterházy Estoras example had much more flavor, with nutty and peppery notes, and pleasant 12.5% alcohol.
    These wines are made to be drunk young, though the reds can certainly mature with a few years in bottle.  And with prices being so reasonable, you can buy a few bottles and taste the same vintage for years to come to see just how bright the future of Burgenland’s wines might be.

 

NOT TO MENTION MESSING UP THE WALLPAPER

A family in London reported that a glass Nutella jar magnified the sun's rays in its kitchen and started  a fire that wrecked their house and killed their dog.