Editor Pick
Bargain Lunch - in the Manor of the Swiss
- May 4, 2009
- Rated 4 of 5 by
koshkha from Northampton, United Kingdom
~ Manor - Manora ~
We've just spent a weekend with our friends Pilar and Antonio who - despite the obviously very Spanish names - now live in Geneva. Pilar's a bargain hunter par excellence and given the challenge of how to live on a budget in one of Europe's more expensive cities, she's spent her time in Geneva wisely tracking down places you can eat without blowing a month's rent money on the privilege. We spent the Bank Holiday weekend with them and Pilar didn't let us down, sniffing out some good places to eat.
Saturday lunchtime found us in the Manora Restaurant on the top floor of the Manor department store in the newer area of the centre of Geneva. Much to our amazement, we realised this was the same department store that our English friends who live in Basle had also taken us to when we visited them a couple of years ago. It seems to be an open secret in the ex-pat community that the buffets in the Manora restaurants are great value. Bearing in mind that we really don't go to Switzerland very often, it's pretty amazing that our two sets of friends both took us to the same department store buffet, albeit in different cities.
Mind you, it seems our friends are not alone in liking the Manora if the crowd in the restaurant on Saturday were anything to go by. It's astonishing to see so many normally very calm and restrained Swiss people taking on the challenge of the 'all you can pile on your plate' set up.
~ This visit ~
We took the escalators up to the top floor passing clothes, electronics, cosmetics and all the usual attractions of a major department store. Even in places like Switzerland it seems the usual shopping frenzy has been tempered by the credit crunch but the Manora restaurant was unquestionably the busiest part of the store. Entering the restaurant we were assaulted by a multi-lingual mass of hungry diners crushing around the place like ants on spilt sugar. Pilar attempted to guide us round the different food options - hot food, salads, a pasta buffet, wok-to-order dishes, massive thin-crust pizzas, desserts and tonnes of different options.
There's an old retail adage that what consumers want is choice. Personally I disagree and when faced with too much choice (most of it in an alien currency and not always a language I understand) is something simple and easy to fathom. In short this consumer wants what she wants (and to hell with all the rest of the food on display). Poor hubby was in a tizzy of indecision; too many people, too much food and too much confusion. We'd been struggling to work out what a Swiss Franc was actually worth ever since we'd arrived and the multiple options of small, medium, large or gargantuan plates was too much of a sensory overload. As is my tendency I gave up on 'What would you like darling?' and switched to bullying my husband instead. I proposed a large plate of mixed salad and a large bowl of pasta to share. He sensibly gave in.
~ The gentle art of building a mountain ~
Back in my student days, it was common practice to compete with friends to see who could get the most on their plate at a salad bar. This was especially challenging when restaurants provided so-called 'kidney-shaped' dishes. The techniques were legendary; a wall of cucumber slices or carrot sticks around the base to widen the plate, a smattering of small tomatoes to anchor everything in place, next some light and floaty lettuce weighted down with something dense and coleslaw like. I forget which of my friends held the record but it was certainly possible to get enough salad that you really didn't have space for whatever had been ordered to go with it.
At Manora my sense of being in a respectable place, surrounded by sensible Swiss people kicked in and I built only a small hill of salad, restricting myself to just what I thought we could actually eat. The salad choices were lovely - very little of the heavy mayonnaise laded cheap stuff of my youth and lots of fresh, crispy, crunchy choices. Asparagus salads with char grilled mushroomes, fabulous colourful mixed bean concoctions, roasted aubergines and courgettes, even odd chunks of something that I think might have been salt cod. After the challenge of elbowing my way along the salad bar, hubby filled a large bowl with simple penne pasta with tomato sauce and a sprinkle of parmesan on top. Neither of us would have won prizes for large-scale food engineering. Our friends were off doing similar. Hubby and I picked up a half litre bottle of mineral water and headed for the cash desk, our entire meal setting us back 26 Swiss France (around the £15 mark, I think).
~ Sitting and Eating ~
Despite being a very busy and very crowded restaurant, the turnover of tables is quick and as we paid for our food, a table became available in a quiet corner and we leapt gazelle-like towards it. The whole of the top floor of the large department store had been filled with tables and there was an ambiance not unlike a student canteen. We hunted down our friends and set about scoffing down our food. I'm happy to say that not a forkful was wasted - we were all of the opinion that when you select from a buffet you should eat what you've taken. After all we were off to see the Red Cross museum the day after and that sense of 'think of the starving in wherever it is that they're starving at the moment' gave us a responsibility to do our best.
At the table next to us sat a young man who clearly was much more practiced than us in the art of exploiting the Manora opportunity. He had the smallest of the available salad plates yet had managed to build a mountain of Mont Blanc proportions. How he kept the whole lot stable long enough to get to the cash desk was a mystery. He'd also obviously been often enough to know that he could get free water from the water dispenser and so was polishing off a mass of food for no more than about 7 francs. Pilar was disgusted - especially as the mountain started to suffer serious landslides the moment he started to eat and the stability of his construction wavered. Personally I felt quite admiring of him, firstly for the sheer amount he'd piled on his plate, and secondly for having the brass-neck to present such a plate at the check out without blushing.
The most in-demand tables at Manora are those on the small terrace at the side of the restaurant. If you can deal with the somewhat intrusive bird netting, I guess this would be a pleasant place to sit on a sunny day. I didn't feel we'd missed out by being inside as the view was nothing very spectacular. Pilar visited the toilets and, once she's gotten over the length of the lines, pronounced them to be clean enough. She's very picky about such things so that probably means you could eat off the toilet without risk.
About ten minutes after we finished eating, a member of staff came and cleared our trays but we didn't feel under any pressure to hurry away. We were quite enjoying people watching in the restaurant and stayed another 20 minutes or so before the lure of a walk by the lake dragged us away.
From journal Geneva on the Cheap - May 2009