The gourmet's guide to Europe

The Rhine valley is not a happy hunting ground for the gourmet. The excellent old-fashioned Hotel du Nord at Cologne has in summer its sheltered restaurant in the fresh air overlooking a charming garden. A little band plays, and the tinkle of a fountain joins with the music. The city also has its picturesque Gurzenich in which is a restaurant ; its inhabitants eat their oysters in the saloon in the Kleine Bügenstrasse, part of a restaurant there, and listen to the band at the Neuesstadt Theater or the Stapelhaus as they drink their wine. A Kempinski restaurant has lately been opened in the Hohestrasse. There are restaurants in the Stadtgarten, and the Flora and Zoological Gardens. Coblentz in summer has two or three terrace restaurants, the Monopol being the best, the great attractions of which are the views of Ehrenbreitstein and of the bridge of boats. A special word of commendation may be given to the balcony restaurant of the Hotel Mattern at Konigswinter. At every little town on either bank there are one or more taverns with a view where the usual rather messy food of provincial Germany is to be obtained, good beer always, and generally excellent wine made from the vineyards on the mountain side. Now and again some restaurant-keeper has a little pool of fresh water in front of his house, and one can select one’s fish to be cooked for breakfast. The wines of the district are far better than its food. German Towns 199 Rudesheim, Schloss Johannisberg, the Steinberg Abbey above Hattenheim, are of course household words, and the man who said that travelling along the Rhine was like reading a restaurant wine-list had some justification for his Philistine speech. One does not expect to discover the real Steinberg Cabinet in a village inn, and the Johannisberg generally found in every hotel in Rhineland is a very inferior wine to that of the Schloss, and is grown in the vineyards round Dorf Johannisberg. I have memories of excellent bottles of wine at Ress’s at Hattenheim, and at the Engel at Erbach ; but the fact that I was making a walking tour may have added to the delight of the draughts. The Marcobrunn vineyards lie between Hattenheim and Erbach. The Hotel Victoria at Bingen has its own vineyards, and makes a capital wine ; and in the valley of the river below Bingen almost every little town and hill— Lorch, Boppard, Orcheim, and the Kreuzberg — has its ' own particular brand, generally excellent. Assmanhausen, which gives such an excellent red wine, is on the opposite bank to Bingen and a little below it. The Rhine boats have a very good assortment of wines on board, but it is wise to run the finger a little way down the list before ordering your bottle, for, though the steamboats keep capital cellars, the very cheap wines on the Rhine are, as is usual in ail countries, of the thinnest description. Most of the British doctors on the Continent make the greater part of their living by attending their fellow-countrymen who drink everywhere anything that is given them free, and who hold that the vin du pays must be drinkable because it is the wine of the country. Our compatriots often swallow the throat-cutting stuff which the farm labourers and stable hands drink, sooner than pay a little extra money for the sound wine of the district. The foreigner who came to 200 The Gourmet's Guide to Europe