Something to Declare

Post No. 9: Beautiful Downtown Zürich

September 11, 2023.

Yesterday, Sunday, was a day of rest for this writer and his editor. Today, we followed Rick Steves’ walking tour of the Altstadt (Old Town). But first lunch. Son-in-law Neil had given us a tip regarding the restaurant Haus Hiltl. In 1898, so we’re told, Ambrosius Hiltl was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and his doctor warned him to give up meat. So he spent some time in the “Vegetarian Home and Abstinence Café” where he met his future wife, Martha Gneupel (employed there as a chef, unusual for a woman in those days). Now cured and married, Ambrosius, and Martha took the place over, and founded the world’s first vegetarian restaurant.

Many years later, their daughter-in-law, Margrith Hiltl, was the Swiss representative to the World Vegetarian Conference in Delhi, in 1951, and she brought back all sorts of Indian seasonings to introduce to Swiss diners. The kitchen staff refused to cook with this stuff (too exotic), so she prepared dishes on her own.

Today, the restaurant, run by the 4th generation, stands on Sihlsstrasse in Zürich, and since 2016, also operates a cooking academy.

The restaurant operates on a buffet model. Diners take plates and load them from an incredible and gorgeous assortment of over 100 vegan and vegetarian dishes, East Asian, South Asian, European, name it. You pay at the bar, by weight. Both of us chose a broad assortment and, for the life of me, neither Stef nor I were able to identify or later recall any dish by name,

except to note that everything was beyond delish. THANK YOU, NEIL!

Thence to the walking tour. It starts at St. Peter’s Church, founded in the 7th Century, but now Protestant. It has one of the world’s largest clock faces (28 feet in diameter!):

We’re informed that the town watchman lived above the clock. If he were to see a fire, he would ring an alarm and display a flag outside the window facing the direction of the blaze. Apparently it worked, since Zürich has no history of terrible fires.

The tour then takes you where you can walk on a grate just above the remains of Roman baths on Thermengasse (“Bath Street”). They were discovered accidentally in 1984, when Zürich’s old town streets were dug up to lay new pipes.

We then arrived at the site of a former wine market (“Weinplatz”), where there’s a fountain and statue of a grape picker.

CORRECTION: In a previous blogpost, we showed a photo of what we thought was the Rathausbrücke, said to be the “ugliest bridge in Switzerland.” WRONG! The previous photo was of the Münsterbrücke (which wasn’t, in truth, all that attractive). The real Rathausbrücke, over the Limmat, doesn’t even look like a bridge at all, just some pavement over the water, with an incongruous carousel from 1880 sitting on it.

We continued onto the other side of the river, in the area called Niedersdorf (“nether town”). We came across Synagogenstrasse (lane of the synagogues):

This is where the Jewish community lived, until the pogrom of 1249. (At that time, I imagine, Poland was starting to look real good.)

We then walked along a route that passes the former Cabaret Voltaire,

where a bunch of artists founded the anti-art (or at least anti-Establishment-art) Dada movement, characterized by antiwar sentiment and surrealism:

The Dada movement lived on for a while, but not the Cabaret Voltaire itself, which closed in 1917 (supposedly because of noise complaints). Further on, there is the clothing store on the site of a former butcher’s establishment:

If you look carefully, you’ll see the old representation of a butcher’s cleaver. And inside, meat hooks still hang from a meat-themed ceiling fresco.

There is also the building at No. 14 Spielgasse, where Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known to the world as Lenin), lived in exile between February 1916 to April 1917.

There are rumors that Lenin visited the Café Voltaire, and may have been a closet Dada-ist.

Taking a turn onto Münstergasse, we visited Schwartzenbach, a quaint grocery that’s been on the site for over 100 years, where items are sold in the old-fashioned way, by weight, in paper sacks.

We scored some expensive raisins.

After yet another charming square, we made our way down to the lower street level, adjoining the river, where we were able to pick up our old friend, Tram No. 4, which took us directly back to the old nabe. Very satisfying day.