Swing Kitchen #1

Review

... no animal was harmed

Photo: Heribert Corn Brief biographical prologue: At the end of the 1970s, the leading diet product manufacturer at the time launched the first sugar-free cola on the market. I was a teenager at the time, suffered from diabetes and had never drunk Coke before. The Diet Coke tasted awful, but I was still very happy about it. Karl Schillinger has now finally finished his vegan burger restaurant "Swing Kitchen". And the question that inevitably arises, namely why a vegan should want to eat burgers, is answered as soon as you enter the restaurant: it looks pretty much like a modern burger joint, it smells just like a burger joint with hot deep-fried fat - and it's packed. So it seems to satisfy some kind of need, such as being able to participate in culinary subculture as a vegan. Maybe. Or maybe it's completely different. After all, the proportion of leather shoe wearers in the Swing Kitchen was estimated at 99 percent, that of down jacket wearers at 50 percent and that of wool sweater wearers at around 80 percent. So perhaps the people here believe they are eating "healthily", or perhaps they go to one of the 8,000 burger restaurants in Vienna and try the vegan one for a change. You can get there by ordering at a till, which can take a little longer, as the need for explanation is obviously enormous. You then get an invoice with a three-digit number, which is called out after a short wait, sometimes by people with a soft voice or slurred pronunciation, which regularly leads to delivery delays. But okay. The chef's salad looks just like the one at the burger chain, only in a compostable box, chopped vegetables, bitter radicchio, no oil, just piquant pseudo-balsamic vinegar. The fact that the only "truly" vegan dish is so lovelessly prepared is astonishing (€ 6.20). The fries are billed as the "best in town". Let's put it this way: they are okay, roughly cut and, as is usually the case in burger huts, far too soft (€ 2.80). The cheeseburger is bright and colorful, looks like a burger, the patty seems strangely artificial, like foam, the patty feels like meat but tastes like cardboard, the only flavor component is a purple sauce, and it is extremely sweet. From the point of view of deprivation, this can pass as a burger substitute, but not in terms of taste (€ 5.80). Things get really bad, however, with a dish called Asia "Duck", in which brown-colored, sticky side strips in a sweet and spicy marinade are placed on the above-mentioned salad (€ 4.60). If I were vegan, I'd feel like a fool. But maybe I'd be just as happy as I was with the diabetic disgusting Coke, who knows. Summary: The long-awaited vegan burger restaurant is finally open. And there are reasons to go there. Curiosity, for example. Swing Kitchen 7th, Schottenfeldg. 3 Mon-Sat 11am-10pm

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