Gourmet guide to Luxembourg - Travel Bookmarks

With passionate foragers and refugee restaurateurs putting innovation at the top of the menu, Luxembourg’s centuries-old traditions are being supplanted by urban honeys, rare-breed beef and ‘végétal’ cuisine.

Two hundred years ago, peasant food – beans, potato and pork – was the order of the day. In a country that’s the wealthiest in the world by head of the population, Bouneschlupp (green bean soup) doesn’t quite cut it.

Mathes is a third-generation family-owned fish restaurant overlooking the Moselle at Ahn. It started as a café where fisherman would bring the pike they’d caught to be poached in riesling. The speciality then, as now, was the friture of small river fish. To eat them, diners snapped off the head and tail and crunched the crisped flesh found in the middle.

The only change with the past is that the fish are imported from France because the river no longer has its stock of ‘petits poissons’. ‘It’s unfortunate,’ confesses Wintersdorf, ‘because the French put a nuclear plant on the other side of the border. It influenced our environment, but we couldn’t do anything about it.’

What happens now counts more than past history. Over a century ago, Luc Meyer’s grandfather owned a ‘boucherie du quartier’ near the French border. His Boucherie-Salaisons Marco Meyer in Bascharage is one part meat emporium, one part brasserie and one part hotel. ‘At the start of the 1980s,’ he recalls, ‘there were over 450 butcher shops in this country. Today, we have 40.’

Luxembourg’s charcuterie owes its smoky quality to the Belgian Ardennes. Its pâtés nod to Alsace, the plate-filling portions Teutonic. A platter of 24-month-old jambon cru at his Béierhaascht with a bottle of unfiltered Lëtzebéier, brewed in-house, would satisfy even an oompah band’s tuba virtuoso. Wintersdorf sums up locals’ appreciation of good food: ‘When we eat at a restaurant, we’re already talking about where we’ll go next.’

Chef René Mathieu owns La Distillerie, in the medieval castle of Bourglinster. Of a Saturday morning he guides a disparate group of wannabe foragers through the woods. ‘Anyone recognise this?’ he asks. ‘Herb Robert – a kind of wild geranium.’ Filling the wicker basket with herbs and leaves he’ll use for his menu, he carries out a running commentary. ‘This is how to pick nettles without them stinging you… We dip them in a tempura batter. The clover-shaped leaves are wood sorrel. And this is a kind of wild garlic…We make pesto from plantain… In spring, bramble shoots taste like asparagus.’ While he’s talking, a boy chaperoned by grandparents bunks off to pick wild raspberries growing beside the path.

Chef Mathieu describes his cooking as ‘végétal’ rather than vegetarian. La Distillerie has been ranked among the world’s top three vegetarian restaurants. Named dishes sound whimsical: 50 Shades of Green; Respect for Our Environment. They look picture-book pretty but have a depth of taste that’s anything but twee. Smoked wild garlic on rosemary and fermented almond is a flavour bomb. A warm salad of peach and apricot, with fresh peas and beans brushed with a ginger juice dressing, simply works.