Beaver Brewing Company

Review

Escape to Egypt

Photo: Heribert Corn The Gasthaus zur Flucht nach Ägypten features prominently in Heimito von Doderer's "Strudelhofstiege"; like most of the inns he describes, the restaurant of this name really did exist. If you search for it on Google, you will find some wonderful Franz Hubmann photos of the restaurant from the 1950s and 1960s. At some point, the restaurant with the fantastic name became the Chinese Restaurant zur chinesischen Mauer, languished as such for years and finally closed down without a trace.
It reopened a week ago Friday, with no sign of Egypt and no sign of an escape, but the original Lambris seems to have been uncovered and recycled - albeit painted grey, like almost the entire restaurant. But grey is cool right now, as are home-brewed beer, burgers and pastrami sandwiches, which is why the new restaurant from American David Beaver offers all of this: At the back of one of the two halls, which has been fitted out with a wooden floor and the inevitable brick wall, a small 250-liter home brewery is emblazoned, where three regular beers and a few specials are to be brewed in the future. Meanwhile, one of the three, the Zwickl, still comes from a microbrewery whose name could/would not be mentioned, nor could the name of the master brewer be revealed, strange somehow. The supposedly locally brewed pale ale, which gets its aroma from two types of hops, Cascade and Tettnanger, is in any case great, beautifully balanced and appetizing. Which brings us to the food, which unfortunately - traditionally a weak point in brewpubs - is completely unoriginal: Caesar salad, burgers and sandwiches. I mean, it's okay anyway, but the burger theme in Vienna is now really well established and there are simply so many that it's really not easy to be at the top. Beaver Brewing certainly doesn't succeed with the cheeseburger, the patties are tough, the 180-gram meat patty dry, the cheddar cheese burnt, at least the small patty of coleslaw tasted pretty good (€ 9.80). The pastrami sandwich seems a little more ambitious, as the hot-smoked, seasoned, cured beef brisket is made in-house - which is no guarantee of success, as you can see: The beaver pastrami is more reminiscent of a beef steak ham and is surprisingly combined in the sandwich with cheese and - even more surprisingly - an onion and bacon sauce. You have to come up with that idea first (€ 9.60), but never mind, the place is definitely not bad, there seems to be a desire for good beer and the food might give you the courage to leave the beaten track a little. To sum up: where Doderer once sat and Hubmann photographed, craft beer is now brewed and pastrami is cured. A little practice is still missing. Beaver Brewing Company 9th, Liechtensteinstr. 69 Sun-Thu 12-24, Fri, Sat 12-1pm

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