Sue Style, Food, Wine and Travel Writer

Before explaining what it was that made it so damn good, a bit of background. The Restaurant Bruderholz in Basel is still familiarly known by the name of its former owner and chef, the great Hans Stucki. (In local parlance, you still go ‘to Stucki’s’, not ‘to the Bruderholz’.) The chef and his wife Susi took the restaurant to great heights, gaining two Michelin stars and 18 out of 20 points in the GaultMillau guide.

Shortly before his untimely death, Stucki sold the restaurant to a courageous local restaurateur Pierre Buess and his wife Laurence. Jean-Claude Wicky, Stucki’s understudy in the kitchen for many years, took over as chef de cuisine. In due course, time came for a change. Wicky moved on (for a short-lived spell at the reborn Hotel Trois Rois) and chef and fellow alsacien Patrick Zimmermann succeeded Wicky. Zimmermann has been moving the cooking steadily up the register ever since.

Let’s get the bum notes out of the way first: I hate the jolly piped music, I find the décor frumpy and I think the tables merit more than boring little azalea plants in pots – but remember, we’re talking complete gastronomic satisfaction here, not aesthetics.

There are three menus at the Bruderholz: the Zimmermann special at CHF159 (£65), the Bruderholz menu at CHF138 (£57) and the lunch menu, served weekdays only, at CHF88 or CHF68 without cheese (£36/28). We went for bust and chose the Zimmermann menu, with the promise of a surprise element built in – we didn’t know exactly what it would entail, only that there would be ‘a fish dish and a main course’. The rest was left deliberately vague. We were here to test the chef.

To keep palates entertained while we waited there was a small liqueur-type glass with two moussey layers: red pepper on top, rucola beneath. On another plate came a diminutive seaweed roll, mildly Japanese/Mediterranean with little diamonds of sundried tomato embedded in fresh goat’s cheese, surrounded by four precise dots of deliciously viscous Balsamic vinegar. Another amuse-gueule arrived: this time a single, succulent cube of brill, and a tiny, pink-skinned fillet of red mullet set on a freshly fried potato crisp with a smudge of tapenade.

Then we sailed into foie gras and never looked back. Pan-fried and fragile-crusted without, melting within, it was served with fresh figs and a little dribble of beetroot juice whose sweetness exactly chimed with the rich unctuousness of the liver. Full marks for presentation, colour and taste.

Next came l’oeuf dans l’oeuf, a sort of savoury île flottante. Egg whites had been whipped to a frenzy and carefully posted into a small, tall cylindrical mould. The yolk was dropped into the centre and the top closed with the slightest sliver of melba toast. (After the meal the chef explained how he’d done it.) The whole was then briefly baked. For serving it was released from its cylindrical corset and showered with an indecent quantity of slivered black truffles that actually tasted like your taste-picture of truffles, the one that’s so seldom matched in reality. When the egg-white wall was broached, the runny yolk coursed out into a surrounding meat jus, whose intensity of flavour was such that it rolled itself around the tongue and persisted long after swallowed.

The fish course turned out to be a sort of lobster roast, the ‘meat’ carved in chubby slices and reassembled under its carapace, the whole set over a sunset-coloured purée of sweet potato with a similarly brilliantly coloured sauce in which crushed sea urchins played a rather delicious role.

For ‘mains’ there was a tiny rack of milk-lamb roasted with thyme and bay served with a confidential portion of polenta and a gorgeous aubergine goo reminiscent of baba ghanoush. The lamb was pink, piping hot and lip-smackingly good.

Finally came desserts. Pastry chef Julien Duvernais is clearly going places. (‘We just hope we can hang on to him for a while’, commented Mme Buess with a smile.) A parade of passion fruit offerings with subtle hints of green tea preceded a mandarine mousse with crunchy praline, each precisely and dazzlingly presented.

The Swiss cave built up by Hans Stucki has been preserved and built upon so there are always interesting bottles. We had a glass of fragrant Chardonnay from Gérald Clavien and a chunky Humagne rouge from André Roduit, both of them from the Valais, Switzerland’s most interesting wine-producing area.

Ever since then, I’ve tried to account for what it was that made the meal so memorable. Now I think I know. We weren’t Bulli-ed with foams, pipettes, gelatine-set items that magically didn’t melt or exploding edible containers. But nor was it the classic, stiff, boring dining experience that you come to expect/dread of old-established places. Instead we had a perfectly constructed meal, skilfully cooked and sensibly presented, with a recognisable structure, rather than a series of unrelated little dishes designed more for the chef’s satisfaction than the diner’s delight. The staff were professional, relaxed and chatty in equal measures.

Sure, at CHF159 the Zimmermann menu is not something you’d go for every day. But in Basel you can easily pay 50 francs a head for a depressingly unmemorable eating experience. I’d gladly forgo three of those all-too-familiar 50-franc jobs, put the money in my piggy bank and blow it all at the Bruderholz (sorry, Stucki) once in a while.

Go soon. Rumour has it that Patrick Zimmermann is set to retrieve the Bruderholz’s second Michelin star. When this happens, tables will be harder to get (the day we went, the place was eerily deserted) and your moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction may have to be postponed.

This article was published in FT Weekend August 11th 2007