A Literary Culinary Journal
Switzerland may be tiny, but we have the world at our fingertips. The iTaste restaurant finder and social network started here, and is quickly spreading all over the world.
Click here to find a restaurant to meet every budget and taste in Australia and in Australia, for example.
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by Jonell Galloway
The new Michelin guide for France came out last week and has caused much stir in the restaurant world. Many think the old-fashioned European restaurant guides such as GaultMillau and Michelin — once had-to-haves for any restaurant lover — are antiquated and stagnant and can’t keep up with our changing times, that they are ancien régime, dinosaurs of times past.
This may well be. While restaurants come and go, some restaurant goers continue to yearn for the traditional cooking of the past, insisting that today’s young chefs don’t even know all the basic techniques of Cuisine, with a capital “C.” In 2010, UNESCO declared that the French gastronomic meal is part of French cultural heritage, defining specific rules and social occasions for partaking of it, as if it were a species in danger of extinction.
Others, such as food critic David Downie, in his article “Surveying the Paris food scene: a mecca again — but is it French?” on Gadling, and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in his review of Au Revoir to All that: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine by Michael Steinberger, dare to question whether the French restaurant scene is still French, yet conclude that it doesn’t matter. Paris and France will always be the Elysian Fields of the food gods, no matter what their nationality, and innovation has never stopped.
What has changed is the way we eat — lighter — and the way we choose restaurants. In France and Switzerland, as in most places, the traditional restaurant guides are often outdated before they even go to print. Restaurants come and go, as do chefs. Establishments are no longer bastions of a certain type of cuisine by a certain chef. Because of this, on-line guides are more flexible and can change with the times. They can be updated daily or even hourly, unlike printed guides.
It is for this reason that The Rambling Epicure is partnering with iTaste, a Swiss-based restaurant social network, which is quickly spreading its antennae all over Europe. iTaste refers to itself as “the food critics’ social network” and “the web’s gourmet word of mouth network.”
The beauty of iTaste is that you can define your tastes in restaurants, read reviews of user-critics with similar taste, and follow their reviews on a regular basis, just as you do with any social network.
Their argument is that Google is convenient, but a human search engine is even better. In the iTaste communitiy, each iTaster becomes a food critic and shares his or her reviews with their contacts and followers.
iTaste was founded by Paul de la Rochefauld in Geneva, Switzerland, and has slowly been spreading its wings to the rest of Europe, including France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. It is in French, English and German. Since it gives you the possibility of entering a location and a restaurant, its possibilities are endless. You can even be the first one to start by entering your favorite restaurant in your home country. See you there!
Click here to go to iTaste.
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by David Downie
Unlikely Discoveries Department: the tearoom, restaurant and courtyard terrace of Bonpoint, the chic clothes emporium for kiddies with well-healed parents.
The official name is “Salon de Thé Bonpoint.” The address: 6 Rue de Tournon (Tel: 01 56 24 05 79). That’s in the 6th arrondissement in Paris, a 2-minute stroll or roll-by-baby carriage from the Luxembourg Gardens and the French Senate in the Luxembourg Palace.
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by Carli Ratcliff
A Pop-up restaurant: Greenhouse by Joost in Sydney, Australia
Joost Bakker is a designer with abhorrence for waste. The son of Dutch flower growers he grew up surrounded by plants and nature and has long held the view that we must touch lightly on the earth. His own home is a straw bale construction, a technique he has also adopted in the construction of his pop-up restaurants.
The Dutch-born designer (his family migrated to Melbourne when he was nine years old) unveiled his first pop-up restaurant in Melbourne’s Federation Square in 2008 and he has another permanent greenhouse in Perth, Western Australia, which was named Perth’s ‘Restaurant of the Year’ in 2010.
His harbourside pop-up, which sits prominently on the point between The Sydney Opera House and The Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened to the public on Monday.
Constructed of shipping containers and the aforementioned straw bales, the interior walls are clad in magnesium oxide boards, impregnated with Bio-Char (a type of charcoal that captures and stores carbon). The exterior of the restaurant is covered in thousands of terracotta pots holding wild strawberry plants.
Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner the menu is based on local, seasonal ingredients, with an emphasis on wholefoods. Local oysters and sustainable fish, including grilled mackerel, are on offer, so too a grass-fed Waygu beef and papaya salad and handmade pappardelle with beef ragù and gremolata (the parsley comes from the roof). All arrive on slabs of plantation timber, which serve as plates, with compostable timber cutlery.
The wheat for pizzas is ground on site; the Perth restaurant currently grinds nearly a tonne of local wheat each week. Butter and yoghurt are made here, as is tonic water, the pasta, bread and pastries. Fresh juices are hand-squeezed to order and natural wines are poured straight from the barrel, both are served in jam jars.
Herbs and leaves are grown on the roof, fed regularly with compost made from the restaurant’s waste, while the oil from the deep fryer is converted into diesel which fuels the restaurant’s electricity.
In six short weeks the restaurant will be packed up. Next stop Milan.
For more information, contact Carli at carliratcliff@theramblingepicure.com
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by Jonell Galloway
Harry Morgan started out as a local butcher in London in 1948. He then opened a hole-in-the-wall deli, serving freshly made New York-style sandwiches, and went on to become a local institution as well as a sit-down restaurant.
The Sunday Times voted his chicken soup the best in London, and the Evening Standard Restaurant Awards nominated it twice for the top 5 best value restaurants in London.
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by Jonell Galloway
The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner was the inventor of the spiritual movement anthroposophy, a kind of intuitive ethics which has thrived in Switzerland, chiefly through the Waldorf schools and through foundations and communities inspired by his teachings. This seventeenth-century castle, Le Castel, was bought by the Lausanne branch of the Rudolf Steiner Foundation in 1989.
The current community living on the grounds of Le Castel practices biodynamic farming, quite in line with Steiner’s view of humans’ relationship to the world. These products are used in the restaurant.
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For the last week or so, I’ve had Valentine’s on the brain. I’ve been posting restaurants offering special Valentine’s meals, chocolate shops making all sorts of beautiful Valentine’s chocolates, as well as hotels offering Valentine’s packages on the Swiss Foodies Twitter account.
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makes for an easy, affordable weekend jaunt. There is no lack of things to do.
The Gothic cathedral is of course, the main thing to see, and you can easily spend 2 days just exploring that.
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Podcast restaurant review of Café Berra in the village of Choëx in the hills above Monthey, Switzerland.
Click here to listen.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
