![\"Ryoh-Ohki](\"http:\/\/outofambit.blogspot.com\/images\/RyohOhkiAnd2Dezi.jpg\")
So I had some calves’ liver (which I love) with onions, and rösti, and a few dezi<\/i> of rosé, and then got the heck out of Dodge and headed for Basel.<\/p>\nWell, not a whole<\/i> day.<\/p>\n
P. and I went into Dublin yesterday evening to see Return of the King<\/i>, then afterwards ran into an old fannish acquaintance and had a late dinner with him: then went back to the hotel and Fell Over Big Time. It’s astonishing the effect seeing such a long and (to the two of us, anyway) emotionally loaded movie can have on your energy levels. It’s going to take days to internalize this one, if not weeks.<\/p>\n
Anyway, around noontime we went up to the airport, had lunch, and then parted company, I heading for LX 401 to Zürich, Peter heading home to feed the cats and get on with his own work. Two hours later I was in Züri: I did the sane thing and sent my luggage ahead of me to Basel (Swiss Railways makes this easy: and they’re probably the only rail system on the planet I would really trust with my luggage…) and then paused for some dinner.<\/p>\n
This is one of the few places in the world where you can genuinely imagine yourself saying to a friend, “I’m dying for a good meal…let’s go to the train station.” Zürich Hauptbahnhof (or “main station”) has eleven restaurants of various kinds, ranging from “Au Premier” upstairs (Michelin-rosetted, I think, though I could be confusing it with the former station buffet at Eaux-Vives in Geneva) to various cafes scattered about the lower levels (there’s a terrific shopping center under the station, not to mention the gym and tanning center and the two supermarkets…).<\/p>\n
My favorite of the main-level restaurants is Brasserie Federal. Once upon a time, a shade more than a hundred fifty years ago, when the Hauptbahnhof first opened, it was the first-class waiting room — and hence has noble classical proportions, beautiful sculpted plasterwork, and a spectacular stained-glass skylight. Nowadays it also features a hundred Swiss beers (twenty or so on draft, the rest bottled) and a great deal of what the Swiss would consider “comfort food”: a lot of rösti, the local version of meat loaf, sausages naturally (the veal and pork bratwurst are terrific), and much other stuff which can be generally classified as “stick-to-your-ribs”. So I had some calves’ liver (which I love) with onions, and rösti, and a few dezi<\/i> of rosé, and then got the heck out of Dodge and headed for Basel.<\/p>\n
The early-ish meal was a good idea, since by the time I hit the hotel (11ish) everything restaurant-like in the neighborhood had closed down. So nothing to do but go upstairs to my room, go wireless (the hotel is a Swisscom hotspot), and take care of business before falling over. There’s a morning appointment in town, and then I can head north to Köln. The final destination…<\/p>\n