Greetings and Happy Spring! This month, we’re sharing our Alpine discoveries outside of NYC. Julia is in Paris and London, taking full advantage of their proximity to high-altitude cheese and wine. And today, Alexandra is sharing her experience at the Stable, DC’s only Swiss restaurant.
Speaking of Alexandra, in case you missed it, check out her recent article in The New Wine Review: Selosse, Under Surveillance. It’s about a benchmark grower Champagne producer that employs a novel technology—NFC chips—in a bid to stop its prized cuvées from being flipped on the secondary market. While you’re there, be sure to check out The New Wine Review’s other great stories.
Along DC’s H-Street Corridor, a once up-and-coming commercial district now known to be in a transitional phase, you’ll encounter a surprising array of storefronts, from big brand stores to independent booksellers; cannabis shops to yoga studios; trendy bars to dingy bars to unknown, empty spaces punctuated by cracked glass windows. But way out at the end of the street, where the bustle just begins to fade, there’s one place that stands out even from the unusual diversity preceding it, and that’s the Stable, DC’s only Swiss restaurant. Its cozy warmth glowed in the darkness of a misty January evening, and as my friend and I approached, we were greeted by the sight of fondue pots flying out the door, carried by the good-natured staff to the restaurant’s outdoor terrace.
The Stable was opened in 2017 by Swiss natives and longtime friends David Fritsche and Silvan Kraemer, serving as Executive Chef and General Manager, respectively. The restaurant was received enthusiastically by DC food press upon opening and has since become a neighborhood standby, weathering the pandemic through local support and some innovative private “chalets” segmenting the otherwise open-air, industrial back dining room. Attendance is at full capacity now, but the chalets have remained, offering a private and transportive dining experience.
Within the quirky comfort of our own chalet we tried so many good things, including of course a Swiss fondue, made with Schlossberger and Vacherin cheeses. The wine list was happily a Swiss-centric selection, and afforded a rare white merlot tasting. This one hailed from Angelo Delea in Ticino and had chasselas blended into it as well, making for an inviting, gently fruity aperitif. A surprisingly dark and spicy gamay from Cave de la Cote Rouge, and an earthy pinot noir from Château d’Auvernier both paired great with our cheesy main course, as we’ve come to expect from high-acid, lighter-bodied Alpine reds.
But the standout menu item, which I mentioned to Kraemer in a follow-up interview, was the chicken wing appetizer, praised even by my friend, who is decidedly not a chicken wing eater. “People really like our wings, it’s funny,” said Kraemer.
As I would learn, the Stable’s wings are not simply a grab at crowd-pleasing American bar food, but rather part of a Swiss tradition in their own right. “Back in the day, in Switzerland, there were a lot of restaurants called ‘Poulet im Chörbli,’ or ‘Chicken in a Basket,’ ” Kraemer explained. “They would do half or whole chickens, with crispy skin and a similar sauce to what we have, and French fries. So that’s where we got this from, where we make our own - not the half chicken or a whole chicken, just the wings. Crispy, similar seasoning, and Cafe de Paris butter sauce.”
A sophisticated Swiss justification of my more plebeian eating habits? Count me in. Read on for more about what most people don’t understand about Swiss food, and why DC might be the best city in the US for a Swiss restaurant to thrive.
(This interview has been edited and condensed)
A lot of people in the U.S. have a limited idea of Swiss food - they think it’s all fondue and raclette. How does the Stable show a more complete picture of Swiss cuisine?
Swiss food is kind of like a cross road from our neighboring countries. Switzerland is a small country with a lot of influences - we have 4 native languages, we have the Italian part, the French-speaking part, and then the German / Austrian part. So you have a lot of regional specialties. Switzerland also used to be a rural country with a lot of farmland, so seasonality is very important. The influences always come from the neighbors we have, and then you’ll see a lot of dairy products - a lot of cheese, cream, and milk in the dishes, as we do have plenty of dairy cows. And then the seasonality, like root vegetables in the winter, lots of potatoes, parsnips, carrots, all that good stuff. There’s also game, like venison, in the fall / winter because of all the forests and hunting that goes on in the wintertime.
If you go to the southern part, you definitely have the Italian influence, you’ll see risottos and pasta dishes, you’ll have polenta. And then in the French part you’ll have dishes from the French influence, like vol-au-vent. So at Stable we have a bit of everything. We have the vol-au-vent, which is puff pastry shells, with chicken dumplings, brussel sprouts. And then we have Zurich-style veal, with a mushroom cream sauce and potato rosti. There’s spackli, which is a Swiss / Southern German egg dumpling. So it’s a lot of mixing, but seasonality, and regionality, those are the big themes of Swiss food.
DC is such an international city. Is that why you chose to set up here?
David and I both worked in DC hotels – about 7 years myself, and for David almost as long. We like DC as a city, and we got well-established here and knew the food scene. Eventually both of us got a little tired of working for corporate, and it was kind of a childhood dream for both of us to open up our own restaurant at some point. Both of us were born and raised in Switzerland, and there were no Swiss restaurants around – very few in the US. So we said why not, let’s give it a try. There’s got to be a reason why, whether people have tried and it hasn’t worked out, or if they haven’t really given it a chance.
DC is very much an international city – you have the Red Cross, the IMF, the World Bank, the embassies. And of course, the Swiss Embassy is here, so we figured there’s a lot of international people here who know Switzerland, and are a little more educated on European food and what makes it different.
Do you attract a lot of Swiss ex-pats, in addition to locals just curious about Swiss cuisine?
We get a good mix. A lot of Swiss people who live in the area dine with us. We’re kind of a destination as well – people come in from Baltimore, or Richmond to get Swiss food. Or people come to DC to go to the Swiss Embassy and then stop by the restaurant because they don’t find this cuisine a lot in the US. And then we established a good following in the neighborhood - people got to know us, Swiss food, European cuisine, and then obviously in the colder months you get the cheese lovers in for the fondue and raclette. And then there are a lot of people who live in DC who have lived or worked in Switzerland, especially in Geneva or Zurich, so they have some sort of a relationship to Switzerland and they come and join us as well.
Swiss wines are so hard to come by in the U.S. How did the wine list come together?
I have a bit of a wine background as well, since I worked in restaurants, and there was a lot of wine training in that. But here, specifically, we tried to stay as close to Switzerland as possible. Through the connections we had from the hotel business before, and knowing people in the industry, we reached out and tried to find as many Swiss wines for an affordable price as we could. We work with importers like Siema Wines, and Swiss Cellars, up in Wisconsin. So we were able to get a good list of Swiss wines, and for the rest we try to have wines that border Switzerland as closely as possible - Northern Italy, Austria, some German, French. Maybe 2 or 3 American wines on the menu, to please the crowds.
How are the wines received by non-Swiss diners?
People don’t know the wines, but we let them taste, and we talk about them. People come to a Swiss restaurant and they want to have a whole Swiss experience, including the wines. They tend to really like the Swiss white wines, since they’re typically dry and crisp. Sometimes Americans don’t like the Swiss reds as much because they’re used to big cabernets. Swiss reds, they’re very much Alpine wines – they’re definitely lighter, the profile is not heavy. But the diners are open to it, and sometimes they say, wow, we didn’t know Switzerland made wine, and they’re actually really good. Generally we get very positive feedback.
Is there any wine that surprises people, or that you especially recommend?
Definitely the white merlot-chasselas blend, and then we have a white merlot by the bottle. People don’t really know about that, and for some it’s interesting to understand how they make a white wine from a red grape. So that’s definitely one to highlight. There’s a lot of educational aspects as well, and Swiss wine gets regional too – chasselas is grown in the French part of Switzerland, and a little bit in south-eastern France, but otherwise it’s not really grown anywhere else in the world. In Ticino, you have the red merlots, and then the white merlots, which are fun and surprising too.
We always talk about expansion at the Stable, but right now nothing on the books. But we’ll see!