At the entrance to a lakeside lido you expect certain smells. Hot fat, cervelat over the embers, the sweetish haze of chips and ketchup, and in between the smell of sun cream and wet wood. It is the cuisine of carefree days, quick, salty, without pretension. All the more surprising, then, to come across the name Hiltl in such a place. Vegetarian dishes on Lake Zurich, where otherwise the bratwurst reigns.
It is only a branch that stands here on the Mythenquai. The parent house of Hiltl lies in the city, on Sihlstrasse, and that is where the story begins. It was founded in 1898 as a «Vegetarierheim und Abstinenz Café», a vegetarian home and temperance café, and according to Guinness World Records it is the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the world. The beginnings were not glorious. People called the place the «root bunker» and its guests «grass eaters». Whoever gave up meat in those days counted as an oddball, because meat was a luxury you allowed yourself on Sundays, not a renunciation you boasted of. That this once ridiculed house, of all places, survived and today serves a public at the lakeshore that would once have reached for the bratwurst says something about the distance an entire idea has travelled.
Because vegetarian cooking was never merely a question of taste. From the start it carried an attitude within it. In Hiltl's case that attitude came from the health movement, from that Zurich world in which Bircher-Benner was running his clinic at the same time and understood nutrition as part of a whole way of life. Food was meant to heal, not only to fill. That is the point at which the menu becomes a world view, and exactly here begins the tension that has accompanied the restaurant trade to this day.
Whoever leaves out meat says, to begin with, only what he does not eat. In practice, however, more often hangs on this leaving out: a notion of the right life, a relationship to the animal, to the environment, to one's own health. And the deeper the conviction, the higher the demand on whoever offers the food. In my own restaurant business I have experienced this often. Offering something vegetarian is one thing. But as soon as vegan food is expected beyond the vegetarian, and expected without compromise, without a trace of butter, egg or honey, the tone shifts. A wish becomes a demand. A preference becomes a test of whether you mean it seriously enough.
That is understandable, and yet it holds a difficulty for every host. The restaurant trade lives by bringing people to one table, people as different as possible. By its nature it is a place of balance, not of purity. Whoever serves guests must serve many things at once, the meat eater and the vegan, the indifferent and the convinced, and do none of them a complete injustice. A kitchen that satisfies only a single doctrine easily turns into a pulpit. And at the table, where people are actually meant to come together, those small tensions then arise that have more to do with conviction than with the food itself.
Perhaps that is precisely where the quiet achievement of the house of Hiltl lies. It has not turned a conviction into a creed you have to profess in order to be allowed in. It offers vegetarian food out of conviction, but it welcomes everyone, including the person who had a sliced veal in cream sauce the day before. Out of the root bunker, which only the dyed-in-the-wool knew, has grown a house where nobody is asked how consistently he lives. As a host you cannot please everyone. But you can hold the door open for everyone. That this thought has today reached even the lakeside lido, where once only the bratwurst counted, is perhaps the greatest victory of an idea that was once dismissed as a crank's notion.