Stucki, the Star of Basel

“I don’t go to Stucki,” a prominent Basel businessman told me recently. “Alsace is just across the border, and I know little places there, places only open a few days a week, where they raise their own chickens and cook them in wood-burning ovens and serve them with five kinds of homemade bread. I have no need to go to Stucki.” He paused, and then added, “Of course, if you’re a visitor to Basel, you must go there.”

Basel, on the Rhine in German-speaking northwestern Switzerland, immediately next door not only to Alsace but to Germany’s Black Forest, is a fascinating city. Its population is a mere 180,000 or so, yet it boasts three full-time orchestras, a world-famous ballet company and more than 20 museums. It has a 500-year-old university and counts Erasmus, Hans Holbein the Younger and Nietzsche among its former residents. It is a major economic center and headquarters for a number of important multinational chemical and pharmaceutical firms--among them Sandoz, which first synthesized LSD.

Gastronomically, though, Basel has a bit of an identity problem. The culinary accents of Alsace and the Black Forest are strong--and it isn’t much harder for a Basler to go to Alsace for lunch (whether to a little place with a wood-burning oven or a gastronomic shrine like the three-star Auberge de l’Ill in nearby Illhausern) than it is for a resident of Encino to go to Santa Monica. Perhaps for that reason, Basel has never really developed a cuisine of its own. When I challenged one dedicated home cook in the city recently to name even a few typical local dishes, the best she could come up with was a kind of flour soup, really nothing more than a roux thinned with stock, that she remembered from her childhood. To this could perhaps be added Laeckerli , a kind of crisp honey cookie with a spice-cake flavor, full of sentimental associations for Baslers.

Still, the city has no shortage of good restaurants. But Stucki is the undisputed star of the Basel dining scene. It has stars, in fact--two of them, from the Guide Michelin. It also has a solid 18/20 rating from Gault-Millau, making it, by that guide’s reckoning, one of the three best restaurants in Switzerland, along with

Chez Max near Zurich and the legendary Girardet in Crissier. Hans Stucki is often mentioned in the same breath with Fredy Girardet, in fact, though his food is much less complex, and his own character seems much warmer. Gault-Millau calls him “la force tranquille de la grande cuisine suisse” --”the quiet strength of great Swiss cooking.”

His restaurant, though known to one and all by his own name, is officially the Restaurant Bruderholz. The Bruderholz is a verdant residential neighborhood on a gentle hill south of downtown Basel, and, when Stucki and his wife Susi bought the old mansion-like restaurant on the hill almost 30 years ago, it was the kind of place families would stop for Sunday lunch--sausages and probably flour soup--after an outing. Today, a trip to Stucki is The outing.

Stucki is one of those chefs who never seems to take a false step.

If he adds an unexpected spice to a sauce, it’s there for a reason; if he mixes and matches culinary references, it’s because he has intuited common qualities in them. A little complimentary appetizer of red pepper mousse, served in an egg cup, for instance, has a subtle but hauntingly familiar accent--which turns out to be turmeric, a perfect earthy mate to the pepper’s sweetness. A dish of slightly crusty rougets-barbues or red mullets is accompanied by thinly sliced artichoke bottoms and a light saffron-spiked aioli-- and the remarkable thing is that the artichokes and saffron turn out to have strong notes of flavor in common, too.

A bed of shredded endive and orange peel cuts the richness of wild duck breast superbly in another Stucki specialty. And a “minestrone” of lobster turns out to be a wonderfully intense vegetable soup--carrots, white beans, onions, etc.--in rich shellfish stock, with generous pieces of tender lobster added--as neat an uptown elaboration of a country dish as I have ever encountered.

Other delights on Stucki’s menu recently have included a salad of mache or lamb’s lettuce, green beans and translucent slices of barely cooked turnip surrounding a vaguely smoky tasting piece of perfectly grilled foie gras ; a single large “ravioli” (the sheer variety of different pasta shapes and sizes that bear that name continue to amaze me) stuffed with herbs and mild cheese and covered in a thick, cheesy cream sauce with plenty of cepes and slices of white truffle--the best version of this sort of dish I’ve ever had; and a pojarsky of rabbit (a pojarsky is a Russian dish of ground chicken or other meat molded into cutlet form and fried), which was in fact a ground rabbit-meat patty wrapped in caul fat, set on a bed of subtle creamed spinach and surrounded with little sea-scallop-size pieces of rabbit loin--rabbit, certainly, as I had never imagined it.

Stucki is also a great specialist in wild game in season, serving such unusual varieties as pigeon ramier or wood pigeon and sarcelles d’hiver , which are small teals, in addition to more conventional kinds. Accompaniments to wild game tend to be more or less standardized in Europe--shredded red cabbage and chestnut puree are common--even in otherwise imaginative restaurants. Stucki, of course, does something different: He promises to garnish whatever game is ordered according to whatever the diner has eaten earlier, making sure not to duplicate flavors. In the case of some tender mignonettes of Scottish venison I ordered one day, this turned out to be a witty variation on the aforementioned traditions--red cabbage, it’s true, but pressed into a little cake and wrapped in green cabbage; a puree of quince instead of chestnut, and a generous portion of sauteed wild mushrooms--hearty and simple and just right. “Sometimes,” Stucki likes to say, “it’s more important to take something away from a dish than to add something to it.”

Among Stucki’s desserts, it should be noted, is an ethereally light strawberries-and-cream-stuffed feuillete based on the flavors of, yes, Laeckerli .

The wine list here is full of French bottles both good and great. More interesting, though, is the selection of top Swiss wines--about 35 whites and a dozen reds--many from minuscule producers, and many quite extraordinary. There is also a first-rate alcohol carte , including such treasures as a velvety, fragrant, aged Swiss kirsch as delicate as old Cognac. Service is superb at Stucki, and the three small, variously furnished dining rooms are handsome and comfortable. There is also a lovely garden, where aperitifs are served in warm weather.

The bad news at Stucki, of course, is the price. It is a very expensive restaurant to begin with, and the weak-kneed condition of the dollar (and corresponding vigorousness of the Swiss franc) makes it doubly so. There is a businessman’s lunch menu at $28 per person, though, and a fancier prix-fixe lunch at $52 a head. Multicourse prix-fixe dinner menus are currently priced about $68, $88 and $112 apiece.

Stucki/Restaurant Bruderholz, Bruderholzallee 42, Basel, (061)35.82.22. Dinner for two, food only, $120-$180 a la carte.