One Wednesday, James and Katie, a lovely couple from Australia, travelled with me from Heidelberg to Luzern where they were going to stay in the renowned Art Deco Hotel Montana.
On our way to Switzerland, we decided to visit two scenic castles: Lichtenstein Castle, which is also called the “fairy-tale castle of Württemberg,” and Hohenzollern Castle, the ancestral seat of the imperial House of Hohenzollern. The original plan after seeing both locations was to have lunch but, when we left Lichtenstein Castle, it was already half past twelve. In view of the fact that it is not easy to find an open restaurant in the German countryside after one o’clock during the week, I proposed that we should have lunch before we toured the Hohenzollern Castle. We needed to find a restaurant quickly, so, in a small village called Mössingen-Öschingen, I stopped alongside some construction workers and asked them if they could recommend a good place to eat. One of the guys said “Let me see what we are having today” and disappeared into the house. I initially thought we would get invited to a family meal but it turned out that by chance we had found a very special place called the Bioland-Demeter Butcher’s shop Grießhaber where every day they serve a completely homemade meal to the locals. Unfortunately, the person I asked, who happened to be the son of the Grießhaber family, came back and told the three of us that all the food had been cooked and served to their customers that day and that there was nothing left. As I asked him if he could recommend a different place where they cooked with such high quality standards, the cook suddenly came out and said
“I will not let those people starve!”
and invited us all inside. After we parked the car, we all went into their “Wirtschäftle” or tavern and were treated to an authentic Swabian meal of bread dumplings with a mushroom sauce. I would say James and Katie liked the meal almost as much as the food at their five star hotel in Luzern.