Brasserie de la Marie

Review

Give me the Marie!

Photo: Heribert Corn Because many people are now so shocked that the Café Griensteidl, which was opened by Raiffeisen in 1990 in a converted counter hall and furnished with a pure pseudo-atmosphere, has been closed due to rental disputes. And because so many people now see the demise of Viennese coffee house culture looming once again. Can anyone still remember the Café Amerling? It was a real, old coffee house, admittedly small and a bit dirty, tourists were never in there and it didn't belong to Raiffeisen either. And when it closed ten years ago, there were no protests, but well, there was hardly any Facebook back then and the general excitement was a little less. Perhaps the despair was also so low because the former Café Amerling was turned into a brilliantly beautiful restaurant called Keke's, where you could eat great West African and Creole food. Who knows, but now Keke's is also history and at the beginning of June Carmen Mihalcea realized her long-standing dream of opening a French restaurant. Born in Romania, she worked in the Viennese gastronomy scene for 14 years, mainly in the two Josefstadt classics Tunnel and Café Merkur, but there was never enough time to go to France, she admits, which didn't change her longing for her own small French restaurant. Okay, the Brasserie de la Marie doesn't look like a brasserie, nor does the food here look particularly brasserie-typical. But no matter, Carmen Mihalcea has painted the façade of the small restaurant purple so that you can see it a little better and decorated it inside with mirrors, beautiful old tables and rattan lampshades, which has turned out very pretty. We were too late to get a permit for the pub garden, but at least we managed to get two small tables in front of the restaurant. For the time being, the menu still wanders a bit between bistro dishes, seemingly indispensable trendy things like burgers and burritos and standards like Caesar salad and ham and cheese toast, so it will need a bit more focus, a few Romanian dishes would be nice.
But you can already find a few good things, the salad à la Marie, for example, consists of iceberg lettuce, deep-fried goat's cheese balls, dried plums, walnuts and sunflower seeds, a lovely salad (€ 7.20). The fact that I had dried plums again with the pork skewers with plums was only due to my lack of concentration, but the skewers with pork fillet, bacon and dried fruit were still really good, with the best roast potatoes in a long time (€ 9.80). Finally, something at the Mahü that's not hip, but likeable. Summary: A small, colorful restaurant with a still somewhat confused kitchen line and a high probability of dried plums. Brasserie de la Marie 6th, Amerlingstr. 15 Tel. 0664/154 77 37 Mon-Sat 11-23, Sun 11-20 www.facebook.com/Brasserie-de-la-Marie

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