Yesterday’s glory: Wini Brugger’s Indochine21

Wakame seaweed salad with salmon sashimi and ingwer-chili-dip

During this year’s Nespresso Gourmet Weeks I visited Wini Brugger’s Indochine 21 that had been on my bucket list for quite a long time. Brugger was awarded chef of the year 2006/07 and was incredibly successful in the mid 2000s.

The restaurant is situated on Vienna’s Ringstraße. On entering nobody was there to welcome us or to take our coats, so we had to wait some time until Mr. Brugger himself came over from a table, where he was drinking and chatting with friends, and helped us. The restaurant itself is decorated in an asia-fusion style which was not so much my taste:

Inside
Inside

We went for the fixed menue (3 courses, 24€). The service was friendly, but not really attentive altough the restaurant was almost empty. We started off with the couvert (3.5 €):

Couvert
Couvert

Well…there was some rather dry vegetable sticks, peanuts, wasabi mayo, crab chips and bread (?!). Nothing special, the mayo was good though.

Wakame seaweed salad with salmon sashimi and ingwer-chili-dip
Wakame seaweed salad with salmon sashimi and ingwer-chili-dip

First of all: I HATE WAKAME. At least the convenience shit they served here – this is full of artificial colors, aromas and preservants. The Wakame was topped with some salmon that was not fatty enough for sashimi and therefore dry and tasteless. The sauces were quite good though, especially the light nutty one. Quite a disappointing start.

Winter vegetable soup with tamarind and thai basil
Winter vegetable soup with tamarind and thai basil

The soup was ok, a dense and sweet-sour soup with fresh, crunchy vegetables and topped with some thai basil. Solid.

Deep fried cod with jungle curry and sezuan pepper
Deep fried cod with jungle curry and sezuan pepper

This was a joke: The cod was clearly old, though it was presented as „fish of the day“ and it tasted sluggish like old deep-frying oil. Moreover it was bedded on – guess what – Wakame again ! The curry below was relatively tasteless.

Stir fry organic duck from the wok with five spices and ginseng
Stir fry organic duck from the wok with five spices and ginseng

The high point (in a relative sense, tough) of the evening was this duck, that was glaced with an extremely thick, dark and very sweet sauce. The duck meat looked more like minced rests than real stir-fry meat, but was tasty and juicy. The „salad“ was again a joke – vinegar all over and the rice was completely tasteless.

Caramelized "wedding" banana pudding
Caramelized „wedding“ banana pudding

What shall I say…yes, there was banana in it. Yes it tasted like pudding. Yes, there was a burnt layer of caramel. No, it was not really nice. And no, the raspberry sauce didn’t fit in.

To be honest, I don’t have a clue where this restaurant got it’s fame from! It is kind of suspicious too, if the head chef is drinking with his friends all evening long and not even one time visits the kitchen. Suppose my food has been cooked and inspected by underpaid Vietnamese kitchen slaves. Maybe it was the „cheap“ calculated menue for Nespresso but they were cutting back extremely on product quality and on preparation. We paid 70€ including drinks – but this was really lost money!

Timon
Spracharbeiter. Kommunikator. Sprecher. Trainer. Historiker. Leidenschaftlicher Koch. Foodie.