Ve Haff Vays Off Making You Talk

Last night we went out for dinner with Reto's entire family. We went to a restaurant, and dinner involved cooking meat ourselves on a thing that looked like some sort of medieval torture item but is apparently called a Tatarenhut, or rather a Tatar's Hat (since presumably there is no reason for it to be named in german). It was weird, and ridiculously meat-heavy.

There was bacon (and incidentally, bacon here is not like what I would call bacon at all. It's more like proscuitto or something, and seems to be comprised far more of fat than of meat. And it tastes really, really meaty), there was veal, there was pork, there was chicken, there was beef. As well as all that meaty abundance, there were hot chips, thousands of mayonnaisey sauces, and assorted types of tinned fruit (lychees, peaches etc). Strange.

The idea was that you hook your chosen meat item onto one of the confession-inducing spikes (there are fires lit beneath) and cook it to your liking. All the fat and whatever that comes out of the meat while it is cooking falls down into the brim of the hat, which is like a little moat filled with vegetables and stock, and when you have finished with the meat the staff there offer to serve up the remaining stock/veggies/meat residue as a soup. We didn't have the soup, but I did eat some of the vegetables, and they were the meatiest vegetables I have ever tasted.

I like the way that Switzies seem to be so into communal activity type meals, like fondue and raclette, where everyone is doing something as they eat and there's a sort of jovial sense of shared food fate (because everyone is eating the same swimming pool of cheese, or because everyone is uncoordinated and dropping meat in the vegetable moat). I like the way that there is something else to focus on if you have run out of conversation. What I don't like is the way these meals generally rely so heavily on one particular ingredient (cheese, meat. And before you say that 'meat' is not one ingredient, I refuse to acknowledge that). Why couldn't I have tortured some slabs of capsicum or asparagus or onion on the Hat of Pain as well?