Belly's Bistro

Review

Dangerously delicious

Vegetables have a somewhat ambivalent status in Austrian cuisine. "It's healthy!" flares up immediately, and "healthy" is synonymous with "bland" in Austrian terms. However, a few vegetable rituals have also successfully established themselves in Schnitzelland. Creamed spinach on Maundy Thursday, for example, stuffed peppers or boiled salad, in which an Augsburger is bedded. Some vegetables have even experienced a real hype in recent years, such as asparagus (which is eaten in Vienna because the Lulu smells so funny), pumpkin or avocado. However, more and more young chefs are showing that vegetables - especially when they are brought to the plate as accurately as possible from the field or garden and not defrosted "freshly harvested" - can really taste like something. Marvin Mudenda is one such chef. He comes from an Austrian-Zimbabwean family, was briefly a professional footballer, embarked on the gastronomic path eleven years ago and worked his way up from the proverbial dishwasher to chef in Austria. Farm-to-table, i.e. sourcing produce directly from the producer, is absolutely his thing, as is organic, and this laid the foundations that enabled organic pioneer Herbert Hofer to hand over his long-established restaurant Dreiklang to a successor he had been looking for for quite some time.
Marvin Mudenda, his sister Melanie and his brother Marcel gave the old organic restaurant a gentle refurbishment, new lamps, a new floor, a few savannah pictures and the name Belly of the Beast, the proverbial name of a highly dangerous situation. But the opposite is true, Marvin keeps his menu small and sources his ingredients as fresh as possible from the trend-setting "Market Garden" protagonists (manual cultivation, close planting, great variety) "Krautwerk" or "Grünzeug vom Feld", from stress-free organic animal breeders such as BOA or Lomo Alto. And then you eat, for example, "Schaf & Paradeiser", a salad of various old varieties of tomato with sheep's ricotta, herb oil and a little sweet chutney (€ 14,-). Or "Carrot & Fennel", a sourdough pancake with a subtly chili spiced carrot cream, marinated raw fennel and roasted sunflower seeds, also very good (€ 13).
Or the weekly changing meat dish, which last week consisted of fluffy veal meatballs with a remarkably good sweet potato cream - Marvin Mudenda said that there was only sweet potato in it, but it can taste like something and doesn't just have to be orange - and delicious runner beans (€ 25). Yes, it's not cheap, but good food unfortunately costs more than bad food. To sum up: a chef with an interesting life story, who sources his produce directly from the producers and cooks good things with it.

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