Xpedit

Review

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The Expedit has been around for almost 25 years. In its early years, it was something of an editorial staff favorite. In 2008, the Expedit team sold their restaurant to filmmaker Peter Ily Huemer to focus on their large-scale Danube Canal projects Badeschiff and Adria. The restaurant was now called Xpedit, remained true to its Italian cuisine, kept some of its regulars and generally steered towards calmer waters. Until a year ago, when Horst Scheuer suddenly took over the helm, breathed the spirit of his former project Skopik & Lohn - the next favourite restaurant of the aforementioned scene - into Xpedit and Jaka-Jan Kajfez cooked great Italian food, if only for a few months. A month ago, Xpedit changed once again. And now it really has. It still looks a bit like the old one, but has been largely cleared out (bad for the acoustics), has a young and motivated service team under Ivana Markovic and a new head chef in the form of the young Ismael Faye. Unlike all Expedit and Xpedit chefs to date, Faye does not hide away, but works in a newly created kitchen window, visible to everyone, including passers-by. Faye previously cooked at Villa Joya in the Algarve, which is considered the best restaurant in Portugal under the management of Dieter Koschina. However, he found it too lavish and not contemporary enough. Even though he had never had anything to do with Ligurian cuisine before, he took up the original kitchen idea again. It starts with the bread at the table: Farinata, the wonderful chickpea flatbread of Liguria, is presented by Faye as a crispy cracker, very good (€ 5,-). The raw strips of Arctic char with a crispy roasted breadcrumb topping and roasted leek unfortunately fell by the wayside in terms of taste (€ 17), while the bean ragout with pumpkin, chard and pecorino seemed more Tuscan than Ligurian, but it didn't matter because it was also very good (€ 17).
And because everyone here is so young and uncomplicated, it was even possible to share the South Burgenland pigeon - absolutely delicious, no, no mangy flying rats from the backyard - with another guest that evening. The main courses here are always served in large portions for two (€ 38). The best dish of the whole evening turned out to be the potatoes with wild garlic buds, but it's only available as a side dish, which is a shame (€ 8). An extremely strong reboot of a scene classic, contemporary, but absolutely true to the original idea.

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