Say Cheese

I am by no means a chef, but I like to cook.  As anyone who has been lucky enough to spend the night with me can tell you, my cheese omelet is to die for.  And I will tell you now, internet, the big secret to my amazing omelet: gruyere cheese.  Most people have no idea what that is.  But I am telling you right now, as a man who loves cheese and has tried almost every sort of cheese there is, this stuff is the cat's pajamas.  I absolutely adore gruyere cheese and put it in everything.  I would marry gruyere cheese except that that would be bigamy.

So you can imagine my reaction when our Swiss hosts tell me that they'd like to take me out for cheese fondue at their favorite fondue place, which is in the town of Gruyeres.  This is like telling Billy Graham, "Okay, we'll jump in the car, head out to Heaven, we'll say hi to God and Jesus, quick lunch with Saint Peter, and then back by dinner, sound OK?"

Yes, Swiss hosts.  That sounds quite acceptable.  I'm like, What, you couldn't get Angelina Jolie to drive me there in a chocolate limousine?  So we piled into the car this morning (just the adults; kids are at school) and headed out to freaking Gruyeres.  I have no idea, by the way, why the cheese is called gruyere but the town's name is actually Gruyeres.  Whatever.

Gruyeres turns out to be a pretty quaint little town, dominated by a large castle on the hill which has now been turned into a sort of merchant area.  The restaurant was called simply The Chateau.  When you walk in the door, you are enveloped by an overpowering, thick aroma of gruyere cheese fondue.  I about fainted, it smelled so good.  It's a charming old place with a bunch of old-wood furniture and whatnot.  First course was bullion soup, which was quite tasty, followed by some dried meat which was also good.

But then the real show started: cheese fondue!  Now, I love cheese fondue.  It's hard to find in LA, and I actually make my own from time to time, but it's such a pain to make and so hard to get right that I probably only make it once every couple of years -- and at least half the time I screw it up.  So while I love, love, love to eat cheese fondue, I hardly ever get to actually have it.






But now I do, from the people who invented it:

This was, no joke, one of the best meals I've ever had.  The fondue was perfect and all the stuff around it was good.  I ate the fondue with French bread and also with small baked potatoes (that's what's in the basket on the left side of the photo above), something I'd never tried before.  They also gave us cornichons and pearl onions, but I was having none of that.  Afterwards there was double-cream in little chocolate cups.  Yum.

Afterwards I wanted to kill myself, figuring the rest of my life is going to be downhill from here.  Instead we walked around Gruyeres a little bit, including the H.R. Giger museum and Alien-themed coffee shop next door.  Not sure why that is here.

Just when you thought this day couldn't get any better for my taste buds, next stop: the Cailler chocolate factory!

I like Johnny Depp, but that remake was fucking blasphemy

Cailler's was one of the very first Swiss chocolatiers.  They're now owned by Nestle (also one of the original Swiss chocolate companies, believe it or not!), but they keep their own recipe and branding.  They offer tours of the place, which was actually a lot more interesting than I expected.  The first half of the tour is a big lesson about the history of chocolate, which, like the history of oil-pressing from 500 blog entries ago, turns out to be fairly fascinating.  Even the latter half of the tour, about how chocolate is made nowadays, was interesting enough to keep me entertained for its 10 minutes of the tour.  

Examining chocolate samples

Then at the end of the tour there's this madness: a room where you can eat all the chocolate you want for free.  Well, or included in the cost of the tour ticket, anyway.  Cailler's puts out samples of every kind of chocolate they make, with a little chocolate sommelier on hand to answer questions and replace the sample trays as they become more than half-empty.

This actually ends up being okay for Cailler's, because their chocolate is so rich and so good that you can only eat a handful of pieces before you absolutely can't have any more.

So we stuffed ourselves with chocolate, and then headed out to the gift shop, which featured Cailler's chocolate in a zillion varieties at 50% of what they go for at retail (according to our hosts).  Some of you reading this blog can expect some excellent tasting souvenirs from my trip.

We then piled back in the car and headed back to the condo, where we all chatted a little but collapsed into bed fairly fast.






Oh, I'm leaving out the whole day before.  Io and I hung out at home and explored more of Meilen.  There was no Gruyeres or Cailler's involved.  Enough said.

Navigating Meilen is made more interesting by the need to 

remember 4-5 awesome German street names

Today we're going to take a little tour of the city of Zurich, which we still haven't really seen (although we've driven through it many times), and then in the afternoon the girls are abandoning me and Christian to take care of Gabe while they head off to a spa.  Sounds great!  For them.

Moment of Zen: