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> "L´Alsace gourmande" |
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Follow my tracks to … Alsace gourmande
Follow Bill and his wife Helen on the French roads visiting France with their France Rail Pass.
straPARIS EST - STRASBOURG
Helen read that a crémant d’Alsace, a sparkling white wine, had won second place in an international sparkling wine contest in Dijon, ahead of any Champagne. We had been to Alsace before, but now, she said, we have a reason to go back. Helen likes bubbles, and I don’t blame her. The TGV from Paris Est station takes only 2:20 to get to Strasbourg, so we got there in time for lunch. The station is historic, built on the site of an old French fort by Germany in 1883. It has gone through many changes since, including getting its glass roof several years ago. This area of France makes for wonderful eating, but with a warning: the food is rich and filling. Pork is the basic meat. Sauerkraut is a basic vegetable. So choucroute, sauerkraut served with ham or sausage, is a basic Alsatian meal, and thanks to emigration over the years, you can order a choucroute all over France. There are Alsatian restaurants in other cities, just as there are Italian restaurants outside Italy, but the best way to appreciate Kougelhopf (a sweet bread with raisins and almonds), baeckeoffe (a meat and potato stew) and the rest of the local specialties is to come here. The names of these dishes are generally in the local dialect, and spellings may change from one menu to another. Train stations are for travelers, and the closest restaurants to the station here serve food from India, China, North Africa and Italy. But a few minutes away, across the street from the Eglise Saint-Jean, is the winstub New Wynmuck. A winstub is a typical Alsatian restaurant, the word meaning in Alsatian “wine room.” We had Flammeküche, which is a sort of Alsatian pizza: thin dough covered with cream, onions, cheese, mushrooms and bacon. We chose a local Riesling to go with it. The nice thing about Alsatian wines is that they are light, and they make a very nice match for the rich food. Helen said we should do our wine shopping tomorrow in Colmar so we wouldn’t be loaded down with bottles, so we spent the afternoon as tourists and took a tram to the European Parliament building, which we took to be quite an honor for France. When I don’t know any better, I let Michelin’s star ratings guide me to a good restaurant, and Strasbourg was no exception. Two of the five rated restaurants in town, Au Crocodile and Buerehiesel, seemed to specialize in chef versions of Alsace traditions, and we chose the latter for its pretty setting in the park and for the chance to eat Schniederspaetle, which are onion raviolis, with grilled frog legs. I don’t know why people think the French eat frog legs all the time, because I have hardly ever seen them at a restaurant. (For our aperitif we had Helen’s bubbles -- a crémant d’Alsace!)
NOT TO BE MISSED
France Rail Pass’partner: STRASBOURG - COLMAR
There are trains all day long to Colmar. We took one in the morning so that we could lunch in Colmar and visit some of the tasting rooms, including Wolfberger’s, whose crémant d’Alsace scored so well in Dijon. Besides a lovely medieval town center, Colmar has a wine school and the Oberlin wine institute, and it is the wine capital of Alsace. There are seven brands of grapes used for Alsace wines: Riesling, pinot blanc, pinot gris and pinot noir, Muscat, gewurztraminer and Sylvaner. What’s nice for an American wine lover is that the Alsace wines are sold by their grape variety, like most California wines. For Burgundy and Bordeaux wines, you are buying from grapes grown at an exact location, whatever the grape might be. In Alsace, a lot of the wine is labeled for its grape variety, and when the label says Alsace, Alsace Grand Cru and Crème d’Alsace, you also know where the grapes were grown. There are about 300 producers in the region, with 51 grand crus. You learn a lot when you listen at wine tastings! We ate at the Auberge Brasserie in the Best Western Grand Hotel Bristol. Our waiter was good with English, but everyone else seemed to be French. We had a delicious choucroute, served in portions too large to finish. The restaurant is across from the main Colmar train station, which was built in 1907 when Alsace was part of the German Empire. It has a church-like look about it, with a tower and arched glass front window. And it resembles the station in Gdansk, Poland, which was built around the same time and by the same Empire. We lingered over coffee until it was time to walk across the street and prepare for our return to Paris Est by TGV.
NOT TO BE MISSED
France Rail Pass’partner: COLMAR - PARIS EST
* (2011 frequency) |
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 06 December 2011 15:26 |
2H20 by TGV
16 trains per day*
