Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Good solid food and plenty of it |
| Disadvantages: |
Serving cold crumble should be listed as a crime against cuisine |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
Another trip to Hamburg and another meal out with colleagues - in this case six of us needed dinner in the week before Christmas. Being at the height of the Christmas Party season, our options were very limited and I'm not sure that we'd have tried this place if others had been available. Unfortunately I can't tell you much about where it is as I got in a taxi and next thing I knew, we were there. But where 'there' was, I'm not at all sure. The name of the street is Bellealliancestrasse - a very international sounding place - and the
restaurant is on the corner with Fruchtallee. One of my UK colleagues who has lived in Hamburg thinks this is in the Winterhude district.
Why is it called Freischwimmer (free swimmer)? I have absolutely no idea. There is a sporting theme to the menu and to their website but no other evidence inside the restaurant. I had hoped that it might be a fish restaurant (fishies being free swimmers) but it wasn't. Or maybe it would be next to a river or a lake where people go swimming - but it wasn't that either. If you know, please leave me a message.
The Restaurant
Apparently there is a cellar with a skittle alley where you can get food and drinks and - obviously - play skittles. But on this occasion we were on the ground floor in the main restaurant. The room was L-shaped with lots of IKEA-style room dividers to break up the space. There are several giant paper lampshades of the type so popular in student accommodation. The tables were all bare wood without cloths and the chairs were oddly low - a bit like stacking school chairs made from bent laminate and metal. These were a bit strange to look at but comfortable enough. The decoration was quite understated with the exception of some Christmassy touches including apples and gourds on the window sills. As is fairly typical at any time of year in Germany, there were plenty of candles.
There's also a terrace outside which I'm told is a great place to eat in the summer but not a realistic option in December. The colleague who booked the restaurant often goes there in the summer with friends who live just across the road. Apparently they are so close that they leave their kids at home and take the baby-monitor.
The Menu
The menu is small with quite a limited choice. It's presented as a photocopied sheet folded down the middle which made me think they might change it quite often. On the plus side a small menu can indicate that there's a high turnover of dishes and everything should be nice and fresh. On the negative side it can mean that you get a choice of 'take it or leave it' on some of the courses, especially if your food options are restricted. A vegetarian would get a decent 'choice' of starters but only one suitable main course - and a pretty odd one at that. But more on that topic later.
The starters suggested a glut of pumpkin in the kitchen (not a word I knew but watch out for Kürbiss on the menu). Surely pumpkins disappear back to pumpkinland once Halloween is passed. There was a pumpkin cream soup with lumps of pumpkin as well as a salad with caramelised apple and marinated pumpkin. That's two more pumpkin dishes than I really needed. Other starters were Irish oysters, a herb salad, a scampi 'spike' with cous cous, stuffed calamaretti (little squids), fried duck liver and a beef carpaccio. Prices ranged from Euro6.50 for the soup up to Euro10 for the carpaccio and oysters were Euro2.80 a pop. There was also something called Obazda but our German colleagues were unable to translate what it was. But it was cheap at just Euro3.
For main courses there was one vegetarian option - a dumpling with mushrooms and wild mushrooms in a cream sauce with cherry tomatoes and some herb that I didn't quite identify. For fish there was fried zander (that's a pike-perch which is very popular in mainland
Europe but not something I've ever been offered in England) with roast potatoes, nuts and a vegetable whose translation I've again forgotten. I'm not good at recognising meat dishes on German menus because I know I won't eat them but there were three choices which included a duck leg and some wild boar. Prices ranged from Euro14.50 for the cheapest of the meat dishes through to Euro21.50 for the wild boar.
If you are lucky enough to just happen to fancy the set menu (no choice - take it or leave it) then that's available for a pretty reasonable Euro29.50. However this wasn't an option for me.
Our Experience
A waiter came to take the drinks order starting with five glasses of prosecco (in retrospect it would probably have made more sense to get a bottle), followed by two bottles of red wine and some San Pellegrino. Getting more water was difficult and each time we had to ask several times before it arrived. I have no idea about the cost of the wine - we tend to leave the wine choice to the boss as he's French. That way if it's awful we can blame him.
The waiter then returned to take the food order. I ordered the scampi and cous cous starter and the dumpling main course. There were three reasons for this; firstly I've never seen a vegetarian dumpling in a German restaurant and was fascinated; secondly it came with wild mushrooms which I adore; and thirdly I just can't resist the word for dumpling. Knödel - what a great word. It sounds exactly like it is - big and round and utterly substantial. The word fills your mouth like the dumpling fills your tummy. The others went mostly for the calamaretti, with one salad and one duck liver. I do find the idea of eating duck really sad - I can't help thinking the human role in life is to feed ducks, not to eat them. For mains we spread around the menu with a couple of ducks, two fish and a wild boar.
The starters arrived about 15 minutes later and I kicked myself. The calamaretti looked so much better than my pathetic little spike of bog standard prawns. For Euro9.50 I got just 5 prawns and a heap of very average cold cous cous although the tiny blobs of salsa were very good. Knowing that the hotel where I stay in Hamburg would serve a portion twice the size for about Euro7, I didn't think this was great value and I suspected that the prawns were probably frozen and pre-prepared. The calamaretti looked gorgeous; perfect little squidling torpedoes stuffed with lemon and rosemary risotto and served on rocket. But overall, no complaints from anyone about the starters.
On to the main courses. I wish I'd got a photo to show you of a Laugenbrezelknödel because it's going to be a challenge to describe it in all its glory. I have strong memories of having a leberknödel soup in Austria back in my meat-eating days which a friend described as looking like a giant greasy testicle covered in tea. The plus point of a veggie dumpling is that there's no fatty meat in it and this dumpling was actually really impressive. It was about the size of a coxes orange pippin and rested triumphant on a pool of mushroom cream sauce that was absolutely the tastiest, mushroomiest sauce I can imagine. A good thing since the dumpling was great for texture but a bit on the dry side.
To my left, my colleague's face dropped like a stone when she realised that the duck she'd ordered had been misheard by the waiter and metamorphosed into the dumpling dish. I thought we might have knödel-tears. She looked at it with such disdain that the poor dumpling must have been pretty upset itself. I wasn't entirely surprised because I thought she'd said 'enten knödel' (duck dumpling) when she ordered but she pointed out it was 'entenkeule' (maybe that's duck leg?).
One of our kindest colleagues offered her his fish, saying he really didn't mind and he'd love a knödel but she saw through his deception and refused it and choked down about half of the dumpling.
For deserts there were five or six options and we split between two apple crumbles, two Valrhona chocolate puddings and a plain ice-cream. I had apple crumble and assumed that it would be hot. I was very disappointed to get a small bowl of cold apple crumble served with a blob of vanilla ice-cream and some runny vanilla sauce. The words of one of a classic ABC song came back to me - 'Can't complain, mustn't grumble. Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble'. This was the opposite - MUST complain and OUGHT to grumble. Cold apple crumble is an international outrage. There really ought to be a law about it.
The little chocolate puddings looked gorgeous and apparently were divine. I kicked myself for the mistake. We all skipped coffees, the boss paid the bill and we called a taxi. The food had been entirely adequate, the service was fine but if I'd tried to write the review more than a few days after my visit, I doubt I'd remember much at all about the night out.
A Thank you
Next morning I discovered that I'd left my rather expensive Peruvian alpaca scarf in the restaurant. Ironically I'd put it on my lap, fearing it might drop off the back of the chair (that reminds me - nobody offered to take our coats). One of my colleagues kindly called the restaurant the next day and sure enough, they had my scarf and he went over to collect it. So thank you to the staff for finding and hanging on to my scarf.
And finally ............
I've complained and grumbled at length in other reviews of Hamburg restaurants about people smoking so I'm thrilled to bits that from 1st Jan there will be no more smoking in bars and restaurants. We'll be able to eat out without smelling of other people's smoke. Well done Hamburg!
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