374 words
This weekend we have ‘Altstadtfest’ in Göttingen. This means that all of downtown is closed down, there are lots of stalls with drunk people running around and as many as ten different stages for music. The latter could be good news except that probably the most exciting music they have are a Queen cover band, a Tarantino cover band (yup, they’re just trying to play songs from Tarantino films – how sad can you be?) and a ska band. Even the ska band was boring in the last year. The whole event is driven by alcohol and fat (and greed of course). The fat comes in many forms and shapes. For example the ubiquitous and particularly gross ‘1/2m Bratwurst’s.
In addition to this my parents came to visit. Which meant I got a decent dinner. A particularly nice one in fact. Now, Göttingen isn’t exactly culinary nirvana – quite the opposite in fact. The focus is on affordable mediocre places. Student town stuff. As my parents kept complaining we just went to the best place in town which we liked before. I indulged in a very nice five course menu of which I even liked the dessert.
I am picky about desserts. Even in good restaurants, I frequently find them disappointing. I tend to think of a meal as an excuse to have a dessert afterwards. I’ve been known to be disappointed when being invited for dinner and not being offered a dessert (apparently many people just don’t like it). It’d be fair to say that I don’t have a sweet tooth but I am a sweet tooth. Often the desserts offered in restaurants seem ‘unbalanced’ to me. They focus on fruit only, or they have too much chocolate and so on. Rarely you’ll get a good balance of sweet and creamy.
But today it was just very good: A blueberry soufflé, i.e. something that pretty much like a blueberry muffin but is very light and airy and had a delicious sugary crust. It was accompanied by some fresh berries and strawberry and gooseberry sorbets both of which were delicious in their own right but went even better with the soufflé.
If this hadn’t been the fifth course already, I would have asked for another one.