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Beef In Switzerland: The Steaks Are High

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Ronald Holden

GENEVA--Everything's expensive here,in large measure because this global city, home to 200,000 people, is the headquarters of countless international organizations (the Red Cross, for example,as well as corporations like Merck), not to mention universities, private schools, prestigious housing. There's enormous pressure to maintain a high standard of living. Alongside Hong Kong, Shanghai and Zurich, Geneva ranks as the most expensive place in the world to live. And to eat steak.

If you're a Swiss citizen, you can easily slip across the border to a butcher shop in France, and bring back a kilo of beef or veal per day for your own use. But commercially, the import duty is roughly $10 per pound.

Switzerland is known more for cheese than beef. A serving of fondue(melted cheese) costs about half what a steak does,

The Café de Paris, on Geneva's rue du Mont Blanc, serves nothing but steak. The place was founded in the 1930s by a gent called Boubier, whose son-in-law, Freddy Dumont concocted a particularly complex compound butter for the café's menu of grilled meats. As immovable as the Matterhorn, as iconic as Geneva's lakefront jet d'eau (a 450-foot column of water), the Café de Paris has spawned a couple of licensed imitators in France (the Entrecôte and Relais de l'Entrecôte chains) and ubiquitous knock-offs (almost every steak-frites joint you've ever been to with a "butter" sauce), And several places around the world called Café de Paris, of course, because you can't trademark Paris, can you?

Here in Geneva, international and sophisticated, the streets are lined with shops selling Rolex watches and diamond jewelry, and the restaurants follow suit. Even a Big Mac runs about $7.

Ronald Holden

The entrecôte here isn't cheap, close to $50, though it does come with all the fries you can eat. One reason that beef is expensive, very expensive: is that the Swiss government needs farmers for all those verdant mountainside pastures, so they place high tariffs on imported beef. We've got it too lucky in the US; the beef lobby is driving down the cost of meat.

Entrecôte, as the name suggests, is the thin, boneless cut "between the ribs." It is exquisitely tender. It's served here with a whipped butter sauce that melts over the meat after it's placed on a warming trivet at the table. The recipe is secret, although anchovies and mustard play central roles.

The current proprietor is François Vouillamoz, who bought the café 35 years ago from his aunt (who purchased it decades earlier it from the childless Dumont), Next year, he told me, he will open the safe in the office, and formally hand over the recipe and the restaurant to his 32-year-old son.

Note & disclosure: I lived in Geneva for three years as a teenager but flew back this month courtesy of the folks at Evian mineral water, who invited me to attend the ribbon-cutting of their new bottling plant. See my previous post.