Collina am Berg

Review

The Balkan Express

Max Stiegl is a Sunday child: born Željko Rašković in 1980 (on a Sunday) in Koper, then still in Yugoslavia, he came to Austria as a child, learned to cook and was lucky enough to be the youngest chef in the world to be awarded a Michelin star in his first job as head chef at Ruster Inamera. He cooked in Vienna for a few years, where he produced a fantastic offal cuisine, and in 2007 was hired by Viennese lawyer and wine collector Hans Bichler to manage his newly renovated Purbach estate. Here, Stiegl quickly became a household name thanks to his shrewd translation of Pannonian home cooking into the gourmet world, causing a stir with dishes of cow udder and pig's bladder, especially with his staged pig dance. Hans Bichler died two years ago and bequeathed the restaurant to Max Stiegl. During the lockdowns, Stiegl reacted in a flash and organized a nationwide mailing of Pannonian food, which was extremely popular. Last year, the Haselsteiner Group hired him to reposition the restaurant in the Knappenhof on the Rax, he said, and this year in May it was announced that the same would happen in the Haselsteiner restaurant on Spittelberg. Max Stiegl has the luck of the brave and the bold. Which is why he turned the high-end brasserie with a richness factor of 10 into something that you really wouldn't have expected: Stanko + Tito, a comparatively inexpensive restaurant with home-style cooking from the countries of the former Yugoslavia, but reinterpreted in a Stiegl way. He wanted to move away from the melancholy pork barbecue of Serbian cuisine and bring in a Croatian-Slovenian-Macedonian-Albanian variety and lightness. A strong statement.
The cans of Karlovačko are chilled in the former champagne coolers, Balkan pop sounds from the loudspeakers and the great Tomaž Fink, also Slovenian, is in the kitchen, and so it goes: with roasted peppers, grammels, farmer's kajmak and homemade cornbread (€ 3), a fabulous dish called poncgar, which consists of beetle beans and plum roaster (€ 6), with delicious calamari stuffed to the brim with djuveč (€ 15) or "Riba bez Mesa", fish without meat: Branzino carcass deep-fried in batter, crispy, and amazing how much is left in it (€ 15). At lunchtime, there's Balkan street food in lepinja flatbread, i.e. extremely crispy beef and lamb Ćevapčići or fabulously good sarma. Or suckling pig roasted in a pizza oven (€ 9.50 each). Oida, sjajno. Summary: The funniest and most original transformation of a pub in a long time - sarma & Ćevapčići instead of pigeon breast.

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