First dinner in Zurich was at Josef, which is a hip restaurant in industrial, super trendy Zurich West. You put together your own meal from a selection of small plates on the menu. 3 dishes are 53CHF, which is cheap for Zurich, considering that you’re at one of those achingly hip places which could easily charge double for the cool surroundings and the in-crowd clientele.
The Swiss are very proud of their homegrown fruit, cows and vegetables, and rightly so. Especially the Swiss meat holds a very high standard, and shouldn’t be missed. On menus, you’ll usually see it marked with a CH to indicate that it’s made in Switzerland.
At Josef I had the Swiss steak tartare, and it was delicious. I liked that they hadn’t mixed too much other stuff into the beef, so you could really taste the flavor of the meat. Those Swiss cows are indeed very tasty, and my plate was attacked from all sides.
The grilled octopus wasn’t Swiss, but still very nice and looked great on the plate. I also liked the Onsen Egg, but I would have preferred the egg to play a stronger lead, because it almost drowned in all the bread crumbs and yellow mash it was resting upon.
We had one of the cheapest wines on the menu, and it was a bit too sweet and not something I would order again, but it filled its purpose, and when we were done with the meal, we were ready for tequila. When I travel with AC, drinking tequila shots on our first night out is an old and stupid tradition, but it’s like that and that’s the way it is.
Josef, Gasometerstrasse 24, Zurich
