Where to stay

Hotel de l’Ecluse The front of this modern minimalist hotel faces the Moselle River, but we recommend opting for a room at the rear as they back onto the steep slopes of a vineyard. It isn’t luxury, but the breakfasts, especially the bakery items, are rather good, and it’s the best-placed location for wine touring. You’ll have no problem hopping over the bridge to Germany for a jaunt, either. Doubles from £69. 29 Waistrooss, 00 352 23 61 91 91, hotel-ecluse.lu

Hotel Sioncini In the Haute Ville, next to the Place Guillaume II, this could class as an art hotel as it locks onto a gallery and is filled with artworks and installations on the stairs. It’s considered, however, more of a poet’s corner. Framed modern poetry decks the landings and figures in all the rooms. These, incidentally, are decent city-centre designs, but get used to the idea that the duvets are laid out horizontally. Is this a Luxembourgian joke? Doubles from £99. 6 Rue de Notre Dame, 00 352 22 28 44, hotelsimoncini.lu

Meliá Luxembourg This outpost from the Spanish hotel group is right next to Museum of Modern Art at the border between Grund, the lower level of the Old Town and Kirchberg, Luxembourg’s business centre. From the outside it looks like a beige Lego brick. Inside, the streamlined rooms have all the amenities of a top four-star. Doubles from £86. 1 Park Drai Eechelen, 00 352 27 33 31, melia.com

Sofitel Luxembourg Europe and Luxembourg Le Grand Ducal Both from the French Sofitel chain but in completely different styles. The former is close to the EU Parliament in Kirchberg, sports oval atrium design and boasts Hugo Zeler’s honey on the breakfast menu. The latter has the best view of the Old Town, particularly from the bar – order a Grand Ducal beer from Stuff Brewery. Both can be expensive but there are bargains to be had at weekends. Doubles from £151/£172. 6 Rue du Fort Niedergrunewald, Quartier Européen Nord Plateau de Kirchberg, 00 352 43 77; 61/40 Boulevard d’Avranches, 00 352 27 86 10 71, accorhotels.com

Travel Information

Luxembourg, also known as Luxembourg City, is the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. A landlocked country, it is bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east and France to the south. The country’s three official languages are French, German and Luxembourgish. Currency is the euro (EUR), and time is one hour ahead of GMT. Flights from the UK take around 1 hour and 15 minutes. The bus journey from the airport to the city centre takes around 30 minutes (£1.70pp one-way). In May the average high is 18C and the average low is 8C.

GETTING THERE
easyJet offers flights from London Gatwick and Luton to Luxembourg Airport. easyjet.com
Luxair flies from London City to Luxembourg. luxair.lu

GETTING AROUND
Luxembourg has an excellent public transport network and, in March of this year, it became the first country to make all public transport free to use, in a concerted effort to reduce car congestion. The exception to the free-for-all public transport system is tickets for first-class travel on trains and certain night bus services.

RESOURCES
Luxembourg for Tourism is the official tourist board. Its website is full of information to help you plan your trip. visitluxembourg.com

Where to eat

Prices are per person for a three-course meal with half a bottle of wine, unless otherwise stated

Beierhaascht Luc Meyer’s brasserie, bolted on to the boucherie-charcuterie (with a factory in the background) is all about meat, preferably in large quantities, including hams, pâtés and steaks. ‘If the meat ain’t good in a butcher’s restaurant, it never will be anywhere else’ is something of a company motto. There’s an on-site microbrewery, too. From £43. 240 Avenue de Luxembourg, 00 352 26 50 85 50, beierhaascht.lu

Chiche! From refugee to restaurant co-owner in three years, Chadi Bekdach has reignited his life while introducing Luxembourgians to the delights of Damascene cooking. His partners, Marianne Donven (who works for the Red Cross) and Pitt Pirotte (a property developer), serve at tables on busy nights, but most of the staff are refugees. From £45. 20 Avenue Pasteur, chiche.lu

La Distillerie In this world-class restaurant, chef René Mathieu doesn’t just pretend to do the foraging thing, he lives it, and translates his considerable knowledge into a string of visually exciting dishes that often have real ‘wow’ factor. Don’t look beyond the outstanding Menu Végétal, which kicks off, when they’re in season, with a plate of Sandrine’s tomatoes and maintains the tempo throughout the meal. Tasting menu £103 (wine not included). 8 Rue du Château, 00 352 78 78 78, bourglinster.lu

Les Jardins d’Anaïs The latest addition to Luxembourg’s Michelin ‘stararchy’, this restaurant with rooms on the city outskirts is the work of Annabelle Hazard and champagne house owner Pascal Soutiran. It is everything you’d expect from a polished bourgeois operation, supremely suave and self-confident. The cuisine has just the right amount of pernickety attention to detail to woo expectant customers. From £78. 2 Place Sainte Cunégonde, 00 352 27 04 83 71, jardinsdanais.lu

Restaurant Léa Linster Léa Linster is an iconic figure in Luxembourg, and diners in her Michelin-starred Frisange restaurant will quickly understand why. Expect a warm welcome, impeccable service and beautifully presented dishes with faultless wine pairings. Tasting menu from £96 (wine not included). 17 Rue de Luxembourg, Frisange, 00 352 23 66 84 11, lealinster.lu

Ma Langue Sourit With two Michelin stars to its name, and a lovely
location on the edge of the forest, this outstanding dining spot is the place
to come to enjoy a seasonal culinary voyage taking in the very best of Luxembourg’s natural larder. Tasting menu from £81 (wine not included).
1 Rue de Remich, Moutfort, 00 352 26 35 20 31, mls.lu

Manoir Kasselslay Tucked-away country house hotel, on the fringes of the Ardennes. Dutch owner Hans Poppelaars ages his own woodruff vinegars, basing his recipe on monastic techniques. His cooking is overtly regional, so expect his menus to feature, game, goat, trout, mustard and spelt. Simple, tidy rooms and great breakfasts with homemade preserves and local honey. From £73. Maison 21, Clervaux/Roder, 00 352 95 84 71, kasselslay.lu

Mathes A fish restaurant nudging the Moselle at Ahn. The French chef is a serious pro who receives daily deliveries of prime John Dory, bass and monkfish shipped from Brittany. His recipes are tasty, portions are well-judged and the house-special friture is as crisp as it should be. The star here is a wine list showing off the Duchy’s finest, and especially those from the Schengen and Ahn areas. From £72. 37 Route du Vin, L-5401 Ahn (Ohn), 00 352 76 01 06, restaurant-mathes.lu

Mosconi Michelin-starred chef Illario Mosconi, formerly from Lombardy, presents wonderfully artful and expertly balanced plates in a beautiful dining room overlooking the river. Tasting menu from £92 (wine not included).
13 Rue Münster, 00 352 54 69 94, mosconi.lu

Um Plateau Just drop by for the bar, and sample its special gin menu. In
the summer, the outdoor restaurant terrace packs out with the city’s great, good and beautiful. The mix ’n’ match sharing dishes are uneven: some hit the mark, while others are toned-down attempts at classics. Nobody seems to mind because the service is fast and the drinks keep flowing. From £30. 6 Plateau Altmunster, 00 352 26 47 84 26, umplateau.lu

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Painted in black lettering on an Old Town loge are the words ‘We’ll stay as we are’ (Mir wölle bleiwe wat mir sind) – Luxembourg’s national motto. The meaning is equivocal. It could be a nationalist rallying call. It might underscore this pocket nation’s standing as an inclusive society. It might reflect a latent conservative streak. Or it might well simply remind locals that the building until recently housed a gay bar.

In 2015 the Grand Duchy held its own referendum. It asked born-and-bred citizens whether foreign residents should be able to vote in elections. ‘Non!’ they said, against the advice of the coalition government. Hardly surprising, but for a detail. Only 52 per cent of the inhabitants are actually Luxembourgian. It’s a genuine, multinational country. And not just that; every day 170,000
French, Belgian and German nationals flock across the border to work. Without the expats, the country wouldn’t function.

Prosperous, tri- and often quadrilingual, bordered by Germany, France and Belgium, it’s Europe’s political and economic nirvana. Cultural, too? That’s more of a dolly mixture. Building the Museum of Modern Art (MUDAM) on the ruins of a Louis XIV fortress makes one kind of macro-symbolic statement. The small details, like bubbles in a flute of its crémant, seem closer to daily life: a Nespresso capsule curtain on a hotel landing; a nascent microbrewery in the garage of a multimillion-euro des res; a tycoon serving plates in a Syrian refugee’s restaurant; urban honey from hives on top of bank HQs; Highland cattle bred by a furniture magnate; the designer watch on a dustman’s wrist.

‘Luxembourg’s charcuterie owes its smoky quality to the Belgian Ardennes. Its pâtés nod to Alsace. A platter of jambon cru with a bottle of Lëtzebéier would satisfy an oompah band’s tuba virtuoso’

Bibi Wintersdorf publishes trilingual magazine Kachen (Cooking). She tries, she says, to keep a balance between what’s native and what’s come from outside: ‘There’s almost no typical Luxembourg cuisine any more. There’s a risk of losing our roots, but we keep an eye on what was once good and make sure it isn’t forgotten.’

Two hundred years ago, peasant food – beans, potato and pork – was the order of the day. In a country that’s the wealthiest in the world by head of the population, Bouneschlupp (green bean soup) doesn’t quite cut it.

Mathes is a third-generation family-owned fish restaurant overlooking the Moselle at Ahn. It started as a café where fisherman would bring the pike they’d caught to be poached in riesling. The speciality then, as now, was the friture of small river fish. To eat them, diners snapped off the head and tail and crunched the crisped flesh found in the middle.

The only change with the past is that the fish are imported from France because the river no longer has its stock of ‘petits poissons’. ‘It’s unfortunate,’ confesses Wintersdorf, ‘because the French put a nuclear plant on the other side of the border. It influenced our environment, but we couldn’t do anything about it.’

What happens now counts more than past history. Over a century ago, Luc Meyer’s grandfather owned a ‘boucherie du quartier’ near the French border. His Boucherie-Salaisons Marco Meyer in Bascharage is one part meat emporium, one part brasserie and one part hotel. ‘At the start of the 1980s,’ he recalls, ‘there were over 450 butcher shops in this country. Today, we have 40.’

Luxembourg’s charcuterie owes its smoky quality to the Belgian Ardennes. Its pâtés nod to Alsace, the plate-filling portions Teutonic. A platter of 24-month-old jambon cru at his Béierhaascht with a bottle of unfiltered Lëtzebéier, brewed in-house, would satisfy even an oompah band’s tuba virtuoso. Wintersdorf sums up locals’ appreciation of good food: ‘When we eat at a restaurant, we’re already talking about where we’ll go next.’

Chef René Mathieu owns La Distillerie, in the medieval castle of Bourglinster. Of a Saturday morning he guides a disparate group of wannabe foragers through the woods. ‘Anyone recognise this?’ he asks. ‘Herb Robert – a kind of wild geranium.’ Filling the wicker basket with herbs and leaves he’ll use for his menu, he carries out a running commentary. ‘This is how to pick nettles without them stinging you... We dip them in a tempura batter. The clover-shaped leaves are wood sorrel. And this is a kind of wild garlic...We make pesto from plantain... In spring, bramble shoots taste like asparagus.’ While he’s talking, a boy chaperoned by grandparents bunks off to pick wild raspberries growing beside the path.

Chef Mathieu describes his cooking as ‘végétal’ rather than vegetarian. La Distillerie has been ranked among the world’s top three vegetarian restaurants. Named dishes sound whimsical: 50 Shades of Green; Respect for Our Environment. They look picture-book pretty but have a depth of taste that’s anything but twee. Smoked wild garlic on rosemary and fermented almond is a flavour bomb. A warm salad of peach and apricot, with fresh peas and beans brushed with a ginger juice dressing, simply works.

René Mathieu is Belgian. Illario Mosconi’s eponymous restaurant in the old Grund quarter serves some of the best Italian cuisine this side of Italy. Syrian refugee Chadi Bekdach has graduated his pop-up, Chiche!, to a smarter Limpertsberg address in under three years. Cyril Molard, of the fêted Ma Langue Sourit, is French.

Luxembourgian Léa Linster is the exception to dominance by incomers. Her parents started Frisange as a café-restaurant and petrol station selling drinks and tobacco. After taking over from them, she became an overnight star by winning the Bocuse d’Or, the first and still the only woman to win a prize that chefs rate as their Olympic gold. That led to a string of series on the German television channel ZDF. She still serves the saddle of lamb (a kind of lamb Wellington) that won her the trophy 30 years ago.

Place Guillaume II’s (known colloquially as Knuedler) twice-weekly food and flower market looks like a film set. Judging by the lorries unloading in the early morning, it’s tempting to guess that most of the food comes from foreign shores. ‘Yes and no,’ says Wintersdorf. ‘The food and flower market’s president Claude Kirsch is Luxembourgian. Everything we can grow here, we do. People are showing much more interest in produits du terroir.’

Many chefs buy their vegetables from Kirsch, whose market garden is located just outside the city limits. Those wanting something extra will usually head for Les Paniers de Sandrine. It’s where René Mathieu buys the tomatoes for his tasting carte. Here, he can choose from 30-something varieties and settles for a dozen in a dish that’s a mix of soup, sorbet and salad.

Meanwhile, Sandrine Pingeon farms 11ha organically on plots near Kirchberg, the commercial axis of the city and where the European Parliament sits. She isn’t too happy because a part of her land has been reclassified for business development.

One producer turning the urban sprawl to his benefit is Hugo Zeler. An apiculturist, he rents his hives to banks, corporations and individuals. They pay him in exchange for a share of the honey. A sign on a door leading to the Sofitel Luxembourg Le Grand Ducal roof warns staff not to touch the hives. There’s a reason, as he explains – move them more than 30cm and the bees can’t find their way home and die. The honey here is technically known as honeydew. His bees don’t gather nectar from plants. Insects such as aphids ingest plant sap and excrete it as a resinous, sugary liquid that the bees collect and carry back to the hive.

He names other honeys miels du quartier after the districts where they’re produced: Limpertsberg has lime and chestnut aromas; residential Bonnevoie gives a typical millefiori taste; Kirchberg reflects the countryside beyond the high-rises.

However fast the city grows, the countryside stays tidy and elegant. Swathes of wheat blanket rolling hills. Wooded lanes pitch through tight valleys. Farmhouses blush with bright, freshly painted facades. Villages are kempt and castles, such as Vianden or Wiltz, add a polite note of romance.

In a field, Marc Scheer is combing the shaggy locks of his prize Highland bull. When he isn’t looking after the herd, he’s CEO of a designer furniture company. Knock at his front door and he’ll sell you his Bratwurst, Mettwurst and Rouladen. Berdorf, in the hiking centre of Mullerthal, has its own hard cheese. A few metres back from the road through Weiler-la-Tour, An Dottesch (roughly ‘At the Doctor’s’) sells ewe’s milk cheese, yoghurt and ice cream from a cubby-hole shop. The owners are agonising over whether to stay small or supply Cactus, a supermarket chain.

Viewed from below, Henri Ruppert’s winery might be a concrete blockhouse. Perched on a rugged crag above Schengen, the vineyard overlooks the viaduct over the Moselle and into Germany. Often, he drives across it to inspect his vines on the far side of the river. Recognised internationally for his rieslings and in the town for his black-and-white collie, Pinot, he’s one of the standard bearers for Luxembourg’s budding reputation as a wine producer. Times have changed. His father, he recalls, made his wine in fibreglass tanks at his filling station.

At entry level, the Grand Duchy’s characteristic Rivaner (Müller-Thurgau) grapes turn out a reliable happy-hour swallow. Switch to the other extreme and you have what one commentator called ‘the best Euro wine nobody has ever heard of’. Both descriptions sound glib but contain kernels of truth.

Domaine Viticole Laurent & Rita Kox in Remich specialises in crémants, the méthode champenoise that’s a popular apéritif tipple or a party wine during a night out in the Haute Ville. Corinne Kox-Sunnen, working alongside her father, says she wants to keep old cépages like Rivaner alive because they’re suited to the terroir: ‘It would be a shame to bring in the classical grape varieties, but we use the old ones in new ways.’

‘At entry level, the Grand Duchy’s characteristic Rivaner grapes turn out a reliable happy-hour swallow. Switch to the other extreme and you have what has been called the best Euro wine nobody has ever heard of ’

She illustrates her point with Fleur Blanches, a flowery, fruity crémant perfect for a warm summer evening. Melusina is another kettle of fish-tail. It’s the name of the first Grand Duke’s wife who, legend has it, took a secret bath once a week. Her husband spied on her and discovered that she was a mermaid. Before he could confront her, she jumped into the river only to appear, weeping, once every seven years thereafter.

To make the cuvée, her father leaves the wine on the lees for seven years before bottling and racking. It’s an assemblage of pinot blanc, pinot noir, chardonnay and riesling. In the glass, a delicate column of beads rises to the surface. Like a very fine champagne? ‘No!’ Corinne insists. ‘We don’t want to copy them. This is a Luxembourgian crémant, not a copycat.’

Her dad, she says, selects mature Luxembourg oak trees and then ships the wood to Bordeaux coopers to be made into his barrels. Like Hugo Zeler with his fragrant honey, like the boys brewing copper-tinted Grande Ducale ale in a garage, like Hans, the Ardennes chef who’s ageing Artemisia vinegar in his cellar, and like the team behind Hotel Simoncini, a poetic statement, innovators in Luxembourg have plenty of space to do their own thing. “Staying as they are” just isn’t what Luxembourgians choose.

Words by Michael Raffael. Photography by Gary Latham.

Michael Raffael and Gary Latham travelled to Luxembourg courtesy of Luxembourg for Tourism. visitluxembourg.com

This feature was taken from the May 2020 issue of Food and Travel.

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