Review: Hotel les Armures

My friend Erin, who some of you may recall from her guest post on Yale d-halls, came out to Geneva for a weekend visit. Her history skillz compelled her to photograph all the Genevan fountains (free water for all!) and other ancient fixtures and signs, but I still managed to convert her into make the weekend a pseudo-culinary tour. (Pseudo, only because because I had an obligation to bring her to regular touristy things.)

Hence, the next series of posts will be reviewing our chock-full-of-food weekend - from chains to fine dining to the Alimentarium (a museum specializing in food and culture, and which I've been plotting to see ever since I've gotten here).

To begin: after Erin got here Friday night, we scrambled to get a stash of food before everything closed at 7. After a quick tour of Old Town, we wandered Bourg de Four for dinner before settling on Hotel les Armures, whose claim to fame is that diplomats and "three Democratic U.S. presidents" have stayed there. (Translated: those darn Republicans.)

Hotel des Armures is well-known for its cheese fondue, but although it was rather cold on the patio, we wanted to get some red meat into our systems for the rather lengthy day trip tomorrow. Erin chose the traditional saucisson-rosti combination (CHF 19), which consisted of a Swiss-cut sausage coupled with rosti, a round cake of shredded potato that can be compared to soft, non-crispy hash browns. I went for a house specialty, the cold roast beef with tartar sauce coupled with fries and a spring mix (CHF 24). We split a wild mushroom soup as a starter (CHF 14).

(You get CHF 1.05 for every US$1 exchanged here, so we just think about it heuristically as one-to-one.)

The mushroom soup was my favorite part of the meal, though Erin relinquished the majority of the bowl to me. As a bisque, it was neither cream-of-mushroom nor chunky broth; although the color was a bit off-putting, it tasted like mushroom sans the bitterness (I silently compared it to the mushroom tart at Porter Square's Chez Henri).



My roast beef froid was pretty good; lots of the red at the center. I usually try to steer away from tartar sauce in the States, but homemade tartar is a different story...plus there were no capers in the tartar. The chunky raw chive added to the top of the tartar made it a little more crisp. The salad was lackluster, and although shredded potato was a good idea in theory, drowning it in a creamy mayonnaise dressing and tossing it on top of the salad was not the best idea.


Fries...hmph. I'm already slightly disgruntled with fries here in Switzerland; they're too potato-y (potatoe-y looks better, but I don't want to pull a Dan Quayle just in case) and yellow colored for my McD sensibilities. To make matters worse, I asked for ketchup and was never served it, and the already-brusque service went downhill from there. Yes, I know I'm hopeless - so please, the ketchup. I can't do it with cracked black pepper, alone. (I could have done with some aioli, too.)


On the other hand, Erin's sausage was amazing. Lots of dense flavor permeated it, and the casing wasn't obnoxious. I prefer Perkins pan-fried hash browns to rosti, but that's probably just because the chewier texture is acquired.

Throwdown: go for the lunch specials at CHF 19. You can get a main plate with risotto/rosti and veggies on the side. And don't ask for the ketchup.

Did you know? Ranch dressing

Tonight, after a spectacularly long nap, my brain cells kicked in: I realized I didn't know what was exactly in the ranch dip I was smothering my carrots and celery in. I mean, I could always realize with my tongue what ranch flavor was and then deduce key facts:

• the red speckles in the dip are probably carrots (or orange M&Ms)
• there's probably some onion in it, since it tastes like garden vegetable cream cheese and because ranch-flavored popcorn and Lay's chips had green herb-like dots on their ranch powder
• it's probably mayonnaise-based because of its opaque white non-shade
  

But really, that was all I could think of. Which brought me to wiki, and then to two little gems that made my day:

• I was right on all three conjectures - even though they weren't that hard. The taste of ranch that I couldn't place comes from a heavy dose of buttermilk, though.
  
• This 2005 Slate article, which provided me with the fact that there is such a thing as the Association for Dressing and Sauces that monitors flavor trends for dips, dressings and sauces. Since I am, after all, a proud nerd, I call dibs on the analysis on the flavor trends' longitudinal data. Also, the association had it right, Greek was totally a trend this year...
  

While we're on this flavor trends business, I have never been able to understand why ranch became the chosen dressing. Today at the salad bar, nearly everyone smothered their salad in ranch (that is, there was more ranch than lettuce on their plate), regardless of any demographic differences. Also, using deep-fried foods (e.g. chicken fingers or fries) as a carrier for ranch dressing seems kind of weird in theory, because you're adding fat to fat. It's like drinking milk with pizza: something that should be avoided until there's nothing left in your fridge.

In that little thought experiment, I began comparing ranch to other dips: Thousand Island (the chili sauce equivalent to ranch -- no way on my fries), ketchup (the sourness provides a contrast to my beloved onion strings), and honey mustard (slightly hot on the tongue, but not enough to alarm most Americans' spicy range). Then I realized that besides the mayonnaise and the fat, that the buttermilk gives a tang to the dressing, and that maybe ranch on chicken fingers did make a little sense.

But ketchup and French dressing, still for the win.

P.S. In the same inquisitive spirit that led me to wonder about ranch, I just looked up French dressing. Apparently it's not just the tomato based, sweetened version of a vinagrette, but it's supposed to be a generic name for all vinagrettes. That said, the wiki article also acknowledges the presence of nationalistic French dressings:

"Those from outside the U.S. may best picture its appearance and consistency as a very high quality interior house paint the color of terra cotta."

Exactly.