Main Course · Austrian
Austria’s grandest beef dish: prime rump simmered for hours in a bone-marrow broth, served with creamed spinach, roasted potatoes, chive sauce, and apple horseradish. Emperor Franz Joseph I ate it daily. The broth arrives first.
Tafelspitz is the Habsburg bourgeoisie’s answer to the question of what to do with a fine piece of beef and two hours to spare. The cut is the rump tip, with long fibres and a thin fat rim. It goes into cold water with bone marrow, root vegetables, peppercorns, and bay leaves, comes slowly to a simmer, and stays there for two to three hours while the collagen breaks down, the fat softens, and the broth develops into something worth drinking. The broth is served first, as a soup course, usually strained clear and poured into a wide bowl. The meat follows.
The accompaniments are traditional and invariable in any serious restaurant: creamed spinach (Rahmspinat), pan-roasted potatoes (Röstkartoffeln), chive sauce (Schnittlauchsauce), and apple-horseradish cream (Apfelkren). The apple horseradish deserves its own sentence: fresh grated horseradish mixed with grated tart apple and a little lemon, sharp and clean, cutting straight through the richness of the beef. It is among the better condiments in Central European cooking.
Emperor Franz Joseph I, the Habsburg emperor who ruled Austria for 68 years, reportedly ate Tafelspitz every day. The Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture now lists the dish as a protected traditional food. These two facts together describe the status Tafelspitz holds: imperial, institutionalised, and still ordered regularly by people who are not trying to be nostalgic.
Stiftskeller St Peter, the restaurant at St Peter’s Abbey, serves Tafelspitz in a setting appropriate to the dish’s imperial associations. Hotel Goldener Hirsch is the other reliable Salzburg address for a correct version. The dish requires a kitchen that takes it seriously; an indifferent Tafelspitz is one of the more disappointing restaurant experiences available.
Where to find it
Since 1407
Salzburg's most storied luxury hotel, on the Getreidegasse since 1407. Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas, Leonard Bernstein, and countless conductors, singers, and heads of state have stayed here. The preferred hotel of the Salzburg Festival world.
Documented since 803 AD
Claimed to be the oldest restaurant in Europe, documented since 803 AD. Located at Stift St. Peter, tucked into the Mönchsberg cliff. Mozart is believed to have dined here. Still run in association with the Benedictine monks.
