After Irene I ate at Lima’s famed restaurant Astrid y Gaston, I jokingly speculated I’d have a hard time deciding which I’d rave about more on my return home—our meal there or the wonders of Machu Picchu. Yes, the food was that good.

And our recent meal at Vienna’s Steirereck im Stadtpark—currently the #11 restaurant on a list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants—had me thinking the same way. Would I rave more about our meal there—or about the New Year’s Eve performance of Die Fledermaus which had brought us to Vienna in the first place.?

The fact I’m writing up this account of our Steirereck meal before posting anything about our night at the opera answers that question!

As we walked through the Stadtpark toward Steirereck for our Saturday lunch, I was a little nervous about how we’d be treated, though. That was because, while one Yelp reviewer called their “fantastic 5 hour lunch here – one of the best afternoons I’ve ever experienced,” and most other Yelpers seemed to agree with raves of their own, another reviewer felt so “angry and frustrated” that she was “about to walk out of the door but stopped by my husband” because “if you are cannot speak German, be prepared to be treated as such.”

And since that latter visit took place only a few weeks before our own, I was worried—were we non-German speakers going to be up for the same sort of treatment? (more…)