136 GOURMET TRAVELLER
A
bout halfway through his 19-plate
tasting menu, around the time of the
arrival of the confit egg yolk served in
its shell with yakitori eel and roasted
millet, Max Natmessnig bounds across
the kitchen with a newsflash. “Joschi’s
just shot a 250 kilogram deer!” he gasps.
Joschi Walch is the owner of the Rote Wand
resort in Zug, a pretty hamlet on the Arlberg massif
in Austria’s western Alps. Natmessnig is his talented
young chef (ex-Brooklyn Fare in Manhattan and
Vienna’s Steirereck) who oversees the Schualhus,
Rote Wand’s hot-ticket, 16-seat chef’s table.
The deer does sound impressive but it’s not enough
to distract me from my post. Natmessnig’s dégustation
launched with a “pre-amuse” of forest mushrooms
in a super-charged fungi broth then segued into nine
“finger dishes”, one-bite delights that range from turnip
to Tyrolean wagyu. His sourdough is presented mid-
banquet like a ritual sacrifice before the gastronomic
games continue – the standout a hibachi-charred hunk
of pigeon seasoned with cassis, chive oil and its own
jus. Beside it, a refined pigeon-blood pudding nests
under a spiegeltent of zucchini.
(The young woman next to me, one half of a
newlywed couple who’s come from Hamburg to eat
here, scrapes her plate with a knife to savour every
drop of jus. I use my fingers.)
At the end of the feast Natmessnig ushers me
into a fir-lined room where a baroque tableau awaits.
Walch and his hunting mates are celebrating at a table
crowned with a deer’s head on a bed of pine branches,
the magnificence of its eleven-point antlers offset
somewhat by a cartoonishly long tongue lolling
from its mouth.