Restaurants
&flora Floral dishes from women's hands
Map
Opening Times
Monday 7.30-16 h
Tuesday to Friday 7-0 h
Saturday 7.30-0 h
Sunday 7.30-16 h
Address
&flora
Breite Gasse 9
1070 Vienna-district 7
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Contact
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The times when hotel restaurants were faceless places, at best suitable for a late meal on the day of arrival, are long gone. The new concepts are sociable, bold and creative. One of the latest additions in Vienna: the &flora at Hotel Gilbert, just a stone's throw from Museumsquartier.
The green exterior façade offers a foretaste of what awaits inside: urban jungle and elegance. Plants dangling from steel girders. In addition, marble, gold and warm earth tones. Above your head, an unobstructed view of the Viennese sky. The restaurant is located in the airy foyer, which is covered by a glass roof. The open kitchen at the back, Parvin Razavi's realm, is also bright and inviting.
She describes her style as colourful, floral and earthy. You only have to try one of her starters, "Summer in Paradise", for example, to understand what she means. Flamed beef tomato meets tomato tartare and peach, a little currant and vanilla. A homage to the last sweet days of summer, to which Parvin adds a spicy note with katsuobushi and dashi stock. She plays with the familiar and cooks intuitively.
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Usually, ingredients are found on the plate with all their components and in different textures: for the "Variation of the Carrot", the vegetable is cooked in a stock made of peel and sake. Because she finds leftovers "primal-satisfying", the carrot greens in deep-fried form provide colour and crunch.
Same with the beetroots: four varieties, each cooked, fried and pickled differently. And leaf-to-root here, too: The side dish is an incredibly tender kimchi made from beet leaves. Sometimes, Parvin tells us, the greens are fried and mixed into the egg dish (just a side note: you can also have breakfast and brunch at &flora).
You can tell that the chef has a heart for root vegetables. Sometimes she spends hours cleaning a box of mini celery tubers, which are then cooked whole and served on a puree. Her cuisine is generally very vegetable-heavy: "Not full, but full," her food is supposed to make you feel.
To get the best produce, she works with local producers who grow the vegetables in the neighbourhood: "I order it on Sunday, they take it out of the ground on Monday, and it's with me on Tuesday! Herbs and flowers come from her own roof garden.
Vegetable focus doesn't mean there aren't great fish and meat dishes: Tartar from old dairy cows - sometimes prepared classically, sometimes "a bit more progressive" with yuzu, soy and Belper tuber. The salmon tartare is also excellent - fruity, spicy, buttery, and so beautifully presented that you almost don't want to eat it.
Parvin only started cooking in 2011. Writing recipes turned into her own blog - so successful that requests for private dinner evenings and catering soon followed. Today, she takes the creative freedom to make whatever she feels like. Hence Asian-inspired coconut-lemongrass soup alongside emmer risotto and spicy grilled melanzani with plenty of mint and pomegranate - a dish probably inspired by her Iranian homeland.
Because much of the cuisine is still male-dominated, she works almost exclusively with women. It was not unusual for her to be the only female cook among many men. Her kitchen at &flora is meant to be a space where her female colleagues can develop freely.
Several courses have been eaten. Full? Yes. But not full! So there is still room for a dessert. The choice is curd cheese dumplings. Sounds like heavy fare, but it's light as a cloud. It's accompanied by white chocolate, stewed plums and recycled brioche crumbs. "It's all a wonderful cycle," states Parvin and laughingly says goodbye into the night.
