Alma Gastrothèque

Review

Chronology of an improvement

Photo: Heribert Corn When Christina Nasr and Andreas Schwarz - one a sales representative at Vereinigte Bühnen, the other a controller - opened their Alma in spring 2018, they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted: a small, friendly restaurant where you can enjoy a nice glass of wine and a few interesting bites to go with it. Home-roasted almonds, home-pickled olives and a few sandwiches topped with the fine ingredients that Nasr and Schwarz had been looking for for a long time. It was good, people liked it, a nice and sensible addition to the Gasthaus Wolf across the street. Last summer, the two of them went on vacation to California. And there they experienced what everyone experiences when they travel to the West Coast for the first time and think that people there only eat burgers, steaks and Coke: the great astonishment at an incredible variety of wonderful vegetables and fruit, artisan cheese makers, mushroom growers, beer brewers, bakers, canners and, of course, natural wines from unconventionally minded winegrowers everywhere - a paradise, so to speak.
So they thought that the concept of their Alma restaurant could perhaps be pushed a little further. That vegetables should be even more in focus and come from great growers like Gärtnerei Bach, that the homemade dairy products could perhaps be developed a little further and that they should now take the natural wine seriously. Which is why they contacted Moritz Herzog, who runs a very good wine shop called Weinskandal that specializes in precisely these wines, doesn't have his own restaurant and therefore liked the idea of filling two shelves in Alma with around 90 different of his quirky wines so that people could drink or simply buy them in Alma. This had the effect of attracting lots of new people and friends of natural wine are not averse to interestingly prepared vegetables. Then a fellow food critic had a kind of religious awakening and you have to book two or three days in advance. And expect to be out of the fried cabbage variety with dairy reduction, egg and smoked ricotta.
The fried carrots in various colors with ginger, sesame, onion, garlic and horseradish were perhaps not quite as sexy, but very good (€ 9.90), the combination of boiled beetroot with beluga lentils, The combination of boiled beetroot with beluga lentils, seed oil and homemade crème fraîche, pickled beetroot and spicy bitter salads was even very good (€ 13.90) and the home-baked focaccia with Labneh cream cheese from their own production and dukkah, a mixture of spices, nuts and oil, was simply great (€ 8.90).
There's beer too, by the way, and it's even from Frastanzer. Summary: A small, friendly restaurant that does everything exactly as before, only somehow a little more intense. Alma Gastrothèque, 4th, Große Neug. 31, tel. 01/997 44 46, Mon-Fri 5pm-2pm,

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