Monday, December 13, 2010

Cafe Uhrwerk: Glashutte

with Unicorn, Kirsten and Christian

Glashutte...a tiny little village...but in Germany, it has the status of a City...is the birthplace of the German Watchmaking industry. Most of the high end manufacturers are based here. From the high end A. Lange & Sohne to Glashutte Original, to Nomos and Wempe and the soon to be relaunched Moritz Grossmann. They are all here...a bit like the Swiss Jura...the little villages which dot the valley...Le Sentier, Le Brassus, La Chaux du Fonds, Nauchatel, et al...

For the photography work I do with A. Lange & Sohne, I am in Glashutte quite often. I either stay in Dresden - the nearest large city...about 29km away or if I am here for longer, at the Heidehof at Dippoldiswalde, about 10km away, and commute by car.

When I first started coming to Glashutte some 13 years ago, this was a little village just risen from the GDR...communist occupied Germany, and has had a repressed economy since the WWII ended. I remember going with good friend and master watchmaker Richard Habring (now with his own workshops in his native Austria) to a butcher shop for lunch as there was probably only a small cafe operating in 1997.



But this year, when I was here in May, I spied a little cafe which opened just behind the DeutschesUhrenmuseum. I ate there several times, and the cuisine is quite good...home cooked food. Very nice surroundings. Comfortable.



So I was to return many times for lunch. This is a typicaly meal there...pasta cooked with goose liver (not foie gras...just the foie without the gras...no force feeding, not fat...just natural goose liver). The liver was a bit firmer than foie gras, and did not really melt in the mouth. The texture is slightly powdery, with a nice mouthfeel, probably due to the fat in the liver. But the flavour was robust, a bit like chicken liver. I enjoyed it quite a bit.





Hauptstraße 19
01768 Glashütte
Germany

No comments: