Zurich Switzerland - The City's Tourism Guide

Accademia

Cuisine Italian
The finest and most elegant Italian restaurant in Zurich, Accademia is much appreciated at lunchtime by bankers and businesspeople, who use it to entertain their clients. In an Art Deco setting scattered with a collection of oil paintings, a uniformed staff politely serves Italian regional dishes, ranging from Venetian to Neapolitan. Specialties include several succulent versions of pasta, risotto with mushrooms, and veal liver alla Veneziana. Daily specialties, when in season, may include various game dishes, including pheasant, venison, wild boar, and partridge. Offerings here rarely disappoint. It may not be imaginative cuisine, but it's certainly good.

Hiltl

Cuisine Vegetarian, Indian
1898 Founded in 1898 but completely redecorated in 1993, this bright, inviting place is Zurich's leading vegetarian restaurant. Its main attraction is a large salad bar, containing more than 40 different types of freshly prepared vegetables. House creations include vegetable paella, mushrooms Stroganoff, and curry colonial. There's a vast choice of fruit juices, teas, draft beer, and wines priced by the glass. The restaurant is also known for its vegetarian Indian specialties, and after 6pm it features an Indian buffet

Confiserie Sprongli

Cuisine Desserts
This old-fashioned pastry shop on Bahnhofstrasse, founded in 1836, is comparable to the legendary Demel in Vienna. Many Zurichers remember this place fondly from their childhood. A variety of pastries and chocolates are sold on the ground floor. The famous Lindt chocolates and the house specialties are about the best you'll ever find. Fixed-price lunches, tea, and coffee are also available. Many old-time Zurichers journey across town for a cup of hot chocolate here.

Seidenspinner (Silk Spinner)

Cuisine Organic Continental
One of the city's most stylish and offbeat restaurants occupies a small but high-ceilinged dining room within what many Zurichers define as a deeply entrenched red light district near Helvetiaplatz, just behind the city's main railway station. It was established a few years ago by one of the city's leading importers of silk, making it the only venue we know of where you can shop for fabrics before dining. Inside the restaurant, you'll find a roster of glass-mosaics, enormous bouquets of artfully arranged flowers, and elaborate table settings that manage to be simultaneously whimsical yet formal, all of this a bemused contrast to the more sordid human dramas occurring on the pavements just outside. The list of food options here is limited but choice, often with no more than four appetizers, four main courses, and four desserts offered for consumption on any given evening. All ingredients are organic and seasonal, listed on an oft-changing handwritten menu, and "spun" into a frequently changing array of dishes likely to include elaborate salads; a "trio" of soups served within three espresso cups (they are likely to include potato leek soup, creamy red beet soup, and a carrot-with-orange soup); homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta and strips of organic salmon; succulent pastas; roasted filet of lamb served with olives and roasted potatoes; and stroganoff of beef

Toscano

Cuisine Italian
Cozy and well-respected for fair prices and well-prepared Italian food, this is the kind of restaurant where local office workers go for a celebratory meal, whenever they're in the neighborhood late after work with a hankering for Mediterranean flavors and memories. It offers a pair of dining rooms, one at street level, the other immediately upstairs, each sheathed in medium-brown wood paneling, with tables which are draped in starched white linens. Established in 2000, it offers menu items that include three kinds of carpaccio (beef, tuna, and freshwater lakefish); skewers of grilled octopus; mussels steamed with tomatoes, garlic, and white wine; grilled seawolf or dorado with fresh vegetables; and many different kinds of pasta.

Between Spaghetti Factory & Blue Monkey. Photo by belpo

Blue Monkey

Cuisine Thai
It may seem incongruous to find a Thai restaurant, replete with Thai paintings and sculptures, and a staff that seems to have been trained in Bangkok, within this medieval-looking guildhall in the center of historic Zurich. But once you get here, you may appreciate its cultural ironies, and even be grateful for a break from too constant a diet of Teutonic food. The street-level venue, known as the Bistro, has tables that are a bit more crowded together, and prices that are a bit lower, than the setting upstairs (the restaurant), where there's a bit more privacy (theoretically at least), better service, and greater attention to detail. Menu items on either level include four different kinds of curry (red, brown, green, and yellow) to accompany, among others, pork, chicken, tofu, or fish. Delectable specialties include roasted duck breast in red curry and coconut milk or grilled marinated beef with lemongrass and a chili and coriander sauce.

Photo by Juliang's Pix

Cafe/Bar Odeon

Cuisine Cafe
This legendary and somewhat schmaltzy 1912 bohemian landmark is a popular singles and gay hangout in the evening. Lenin came here during World War I to make such pronouncements as "The neutrality of Switzerland is a bourgeois fraud and means submission to the imperialist war." Thornton Wilder also sloshed down a few here, as did Mussolini and Mata Hari. The intimate, Art Nouveau cafe has banquettes and cubbyholes. It also sports a curved bar and many sidewalk tables.