Xian

Review

Brigittenau meets the world

These sake bars are currently going through the roof worldwide. London, Singapore, Paris, Stockholm, New York and of course Tokyo - everywhere they combine these complex and delicate rice brews from Japan with elaborate gourmet snacks. Viennese media and performance artist Florian Schmeiser got to know the stuff 20 years ago in a New York basement bar, when sake was anything but chic, "and they didn't have anything to eat there either".
Together with his wife, Schmeiser runs the Central Garden on the Danube Canal, and somehow he couldn't get the idea of an underground sake bar out of his head. Then he traveled to China and came to the conclusion that Brigittenau was exactly the right place for his project: "mixed ethnicity, lots of municipal buildings, lots of greenery, Berlin flair" and even affordable.
So he renovated the old Mösslinger wine house "Zum Tausender", which had stood empty for five years, and turned it into a mixture of gallery and café, as purist as it gets, with no trace of gourmet chic.
The location and appearance have the side effect that the chic gourmets haven't really found Xian yet, so Schmeiser limits himself to an affordable range that doesn't quite reach the heights of sake quality. Instead, there's fun food, not Japanese, not izakaya, not wagyu, not sushi, but Chinese and Indian street food. Spicy Sichuan noodles, for example, pork belly with pak choi, stuffed banana leaves and really good jiaozi stuffed with pork and Chinese cabbage, whose sauce Schmeiser says he spent a long time working on and which comes pretty close to the sauces on the streets of Chengdu (€ 9.50).
He is particularly proud of his Jianbing version, the Chinese crêpe filled with egg, crackers, lettuce and spring onion, which he makes from chickpea flour and which is certainly one of the best of its kind in Vienna (€ 8.50). Xian shows its true spirit, however, when it comes to the snacks on offer here: Namely, various nibbles that Florian Schmeiser buys together in Vienna's Asian markets and which very few of us have probably ever tasted in front of the TV: deep-fried chili peppers with sesame seeds, for example, or fibrous beef chips, deep-fried and candied beans or, as a highlight, "stinky tofu", a slice of fermented and not so stinky tofu from the foil packaging anyway, a kind of Chinese snack nibble, so to speak.
It's a shame there's no Japanese beer, but at least there's Chinese and Czech. To sum up: a sake bar without an elitist attitude, in a place where you wouldn't expect to find a sake bar. And with wonderfully quirky snacks.

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