Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Alte Schmiede

This is a bit of an insider-tip in the summer, and completely overrun by tourists in the winter: Alte Schmiede in Leogang.

This place always amazes me. Yes, it is somewhat touristy, but it is very well done. Basically, imagine a restaurant at the top of a mountain that you can get to by lift or mountain bike (long uphill ride...) built out of collected parts and pieces from very old buildings (farms, black smith shops, mills,...) from all over Austria. So everything you see at this place is hundreds of years old, much of it more than 500 years. I can not even begin to imagine the effort and time it took to find all this stuff. The cost aspect, we will completely ignore for now... ;-)

None of this is done by accident. The whole place is carefully designed, from the eating areas to the bathrooms to the great view. It is somewhat over the top, yet at the same time pretty authentic. Prices are also reasonable (relatively speaking of course), and all the food I ever had there was very good. All the dishes are very authentic Austrian food (generally I shy away from tourist places because they serve "Austrian" food that no local would ever eat...), and some of the items on the menu are very hard to find elsewhere.

In short: This is a must-see place.

We went there just a few days ago. Unfortunately, the weather was not very good, so I didn't take very many photos, and those I did take are not all that great. Here is one:

The mountains in the background are accross the valey. The place itself is really pretty much at the top of its own mountain.

To give you a better idea of what the place is like (especially inside), I "borrowed" a few pictures from their web page. Here they are:

As I said: None of this stuff is fake. It is all authentic and has been working equipment, some of it hundreds of years ago. Even the bricks and the wood came from old buildings.

And for the romantics among my readers, here is the winter shot: