Rinkhy

Review

Make Rinkhy great again

Andrew Rinkhy is a photographer from Canada who once got on my nerves at a caviar tasting because he demanded to pose with a caviar spoon. Until one day, a tiny restaurant opened in Zieglergasse that served great wines, where people spontaneously started playing the guitar and where fine canned fish was served in the Spanish tapas bar style. Lo and behold, Andrew Rinkhy was the boss. Last week, the Canadian opened a new restaurant: again in Zieglergasse, much bigger and actually with the same concept as before, only much more elaborate. So still absolutely great canned fish, such as line-caught tuna from the Azores or the particularly tender vintage sardines. The only difference is that Andrew Rinkhy has now taken on a chef from Spanish sea snails come with marinated garlic, red onions and Spain's famous Espinaler sauce (€8.90), while the briefly and hotly seared wild prawns with homemade cocktail sauce remind you of how insanely good prawns were before the invention of Thai antibiotic shrimps (€13.50).
The sardines on toasted sourdough bread with tapenade were terrific in all their simplicity (€ 11.50), but the best of all the dishes tasted was probably the baked white beans with saffron, garlic, parsley and mussels - a dish to remember (€ 9.90).
And because the whole thing is no longer so reminiscent of a small Spanish tapas bar, but more of a French brasserie, there are of course oysters, lots of oysters: Rinkhy has had a kind of aquarium built in which he can store up to 1500 of the stony mussels.
There are three different varieties, simple Fines de Claire from the Charente (six pieces for €15), massive premium oysters from Ireland (six pieces for €21) or the very special flat, delicate, nutty oysters from Kerpenhir in Brittany (six pieces for €21).
The mussels are served in proper style with lemon and vinegar on an ice cream étagère, the horseradish and chilli sauces are probably a nod to Andrew's Canadian homeland, also okay. Nobody played guitar there last week, but I was on the verge of singing, I swear ... A fun little tapas bar has not only become much bigger, but also more edible, more elegant and more French.

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