O boufés

Review

Single aisles

Photo: Heribert Corn Photographers from a Swedish gourmet magazine have just arrived, Fool, they say it's the best food magazine in the world. They are going to make a cookbook with Konstantin Filippou. Claudia Stöckl has just come in for a meeting, Filippou is the next celebrity on her breakfast show. The young man from Graz is a star. This is probably not directly related to the fact that he has just opened a new restaurant, but rather to the fact that he is one of the best chefs in the country, not an imitator or an afterthought. After just one and a half years, his gourmet restaurant has already been awarded three toques by Gault Millau, 93 points by A la Carte and a Michelin star. Normally, in situations like this, it's all about consolidation, maintaining status and managing energy. What you don't expect with chefs who have become successful in a flash is for them to open their next restaurant two years later. While the gourmet restaurant has an elegant, cool, understated design and is characterized by a love of fine materials, o boufés is completely plain, with scraped walls and very discreet use of brass furniture. There are two menus in the restaurant, which you can choose between four or six courses, with limited flexibility and, of course, a high price tag. The new buffet is completely different, with around a dozen dishes in total, all of which are starters and priced between eight and 15 euros, with a few main courses costing a little more, so you can take what, when and how often you want.
However, what Filippou and his team cook here is nothing less than grandiose and probably the best you can get for this price at the moment: fava, a flat pea cream with roasted bacon, for example, fabulously good (€9), or raw mackerel on cauliflower cream with fried cauliflower and roasted pine nuts. Heaven! (€ 13.-) Or probably the best, most intense minestrone I have ever eaten (€ 8.-), or gilthead bream ceviche on dill yoghurt with radishes - it's so incredibly good that you can hardly stand it without alcohol (€ 14.-). And speaking of which, that's where it gets even more interesting: there are only so-called natural wines to drink here, but then there are around 300 of them and the best from Austria, France, Italy and the Karst. You could disparagingly call them "hipster wines", but in fact these wines, which are as natural as possible and made from partly forgotten grape varieties and ancient vines, are (fortunately) what the wine scene is all about at the moment. A great place in any case. I can't wait to see what Filippou opens in two years' time. Summary: the star chef's second restaurant is not a gourmet hut, but a kind of wine bar with great small dishes to go with it. o boufés, 1st, Dominikanerbastei 17 Tel. 01/512 22 29-10 Mon-Fri 11.30-15, 17.30-24 hrs

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