The best burger of my life and other Geneva tips

I recently spent a couple of days in Geneva for the wedding of two friends of mine. The wedding was a culinary delight but I was so busy taking pictures of the wedding for the couple that the camera's battery was empty by the time dinner was served (luckily I wasn't the official wedding photographer!).
So all I have are a couple of links:

1) Dinner was at Les Bains des Paquis, which is part of the Lake Geneva Lido, where people swim in summer and go to the hammam in winter. They serve Champagne Fondue in their pop up restaurant during winter. Service is chaotic but the atmosphere lovely - the tiled changing cubicles serve as mini cloakrooms. And the fondue is one of the best I've ever had - the champagne makes it much 'lighter' than normal fondue. http://www.buvettedesbains.ch/pages/fondue.html

2) The wedding cakes (s - there were three huge ones, no chance that we could eat them all. Luckily we were given some to take home the next day, which we ate in the car while stuck in traffic between Geneva and Zurich...)

The wedding cake was definitely the best I've ever had! I'm not that into sweet things, especially not creamy, chocolatey cakes, but this one was a whole different story. It had one layer that tasted a bit like the filling of Kinder Schokolade and a lovely crunchy, very moreish layer.
It seems that the Chocolatier who made the cake doesn't have a website, so here a link with all infos: http://www.itaste.com/list/restaurant/de/geneve/christophe-berger-confiserie-patisserie.html

The day after the wedding we sat in Cafe Remor all day with people, food and coffee coming and going. They had the normal selection of bistro type food like soups, hot and cold sandwiches, salades, quiche, croque monsieur and a selection of burgers with special ingredients: lamb burgers, different chutneys and sauces, grilled peppers etc. All burgers were served in a poppy seed bun and with salade and baby potatoes. It was by far the best burger I've ever had!!!

http://www.remor.ch/

Food and memories

Few things bring back memories the way food can.

In September I was in New York for a few days to visit family and friends. I spent a morning at the Neue Galerie enjoying the Klimts and Schieles (I've been obsessed with the art, design and architecture of the Wiener Secession lately and I love Schiele!). While I was waiting for my sister-in-law to join me I felt a pang of hunger and so I went to the Café Sabarsky for breakfast. Just reading the menu made me feel homesick and made me think about and miss so many places I love: Vienna, the childhood holidays spent in the Austrian countryside, breakfasts in Berlin (the capital of breakfasts - at least it was until not too long ago...) At first I couldn't decide what to order there were so many amazing breakfasts on offer: Kaiserschmarrn, Weisswurst, Eier im Glas... I had to go for the latter, one of my all time favorites! It seems it's not a frequently ordered dish - all the wonderful Upper East Side Ladies oohed and aahed when it arrived and looked very surprised to see peeled eggs in a Martini glass:

http://www.neuegalerie.org/cafes/sabarsky

I had a food and memory experience this summer. I was roadtripping around Central and Eastern Europe with two friends of mine, who also thoroughly enjoy food... Everywhere we went we bought a few things at local supermarkets to take home with us. Austria was paradise for this - we bought amazing Kürbiskernöl (pumpkin seed oil), Powidl (plum jam) and Schokobananen. As a kid my family spent every summer holiday in the Austrian countryside with friends in their countryside house. The house is right next to a forest and mountain a few kilometers away form the next village. Lunches and dinners consisted of fish freshly caught by my dad and his friend KTh and rarely a deer they hunted and of the herbs and veggies Gigi (KTh's wife) grew in her vegetable garden. A couple of times a week we would drive into town to buy everything else we needed including Schokobananen - the most horrible, artificial, yellow, gooey stuff covered in chocolate. Us kids loooooved them and luckily KTh did too. Every evening after dinner he would get out one and cut it in slices - one per person. Which meant that every person got an approximately 0.8 cm slice of chocolate banana...