Watertuin

Review

Eat faster, darling!

Photo: Katharina Gossow Gigantomania is naturally impressive. And the new Watertuin is very, very, VERY gigantic: The branch of a Dutch franchise chain opened by the operators of the Ebi eateries a month ago is located at the south-easternmost corner of Vienna, just outside Schwechat; it is housed in a hall measuring around 2,500 square meters, where a textile discount store previously had a good space; it has a parking lot as big as that of a textile discount store on the outskirts of the city; it has around 1,000 seats and 13 serving areas; and you can eat and drink as much as you want and can for a flat rate. It's absolutely crazy. The crucial difference to other all-you-can-eat models is that instead of a flat rate, you buy a time budget: 14 euros for an hour for lunch, 19 euros for two, 23 euros for an hour in the evening, 31 for two. You enter the gymnasium-style restaurant via a gate, pay for the desired length of stay, receive a map and a letter with the start and end times. And then you are in this hangar, first trying to get your bearings, inevitably failing, getting slightly stressed because you think you are running out of time. The 13 kitchens and serving stations offer grilled meat, grilled fish, pizza and pasta, starter, main course and dessert buffets, a sushi section, a soup buffet, an Asian buffet, a wine tap, a beer tap, drinks fridges ... in the space of two tennis courts.
The food is served in a kind of indoor pagoda (surrounded by a moat in which lots and lots of very large koi carp swim) or at ground level or beyond the kitchens.
Of course, at the beginning you take too much and the wrong things. You discover that there is lobster at a stall (a maximum of half a lobster per person), have it grilled, go for the meat in the meantime, the lobster gets cold again ... And of course not everything is good. The lobsters are tiny, I wouldn't recommend the oysters, the roast beef or lamb steaks are disastrously cut, bursting with flats, when it comes to preparing the T-bone steak you are tempted to give the men at the grill tips. But this is pointless, they obviously want or need to fry meat to death. But it's not all bad either. The wok station and sushi are up to the standard of Asian restaurant chains, the starter buffets are no better at company Christmas parties, and I'm not sure whether the crayfish were for eating or for decoration, but they were okay. Gourmets and friends of sustainability are not the target group. As a student, I would probably have loved Watertuin ... To sum up: a new restaurant that simply goes beyond all the dimensions and rules we knew from Viennese restaurants. Very. Watertuin 11th, Etrichstr. 23 Tel. 01/767 14 97 Mon-Fri 12-16, 17-22, Sat, Sun, Fei 12-22 hrs

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