Schwellenmätteli Restaurants (Casa and Terrassen)
Dalmaziquai 11
Cuisines: Italian, European
About
Set to the south and across the river from the old town, immediately adjacent to one of its busiest bridges (the Kirchenfeldbrücke), at a particularly wide point of the Aare, this restaurant prooves that the Swiss can be very good at replicating the beachfront restaurants of Italy. Thanks to artfully arranged wooden tables, parasols, streaming sunlight, flowering shrubs, and panoramas of the old town, some fans of this place define it as Die Berner Riviera (The Bernese Riviera). As such, during warm weather, the young, the beautiful, the restless, and the merely prosperous head to Terrassen for outdoor seating, stiff drinks (especially ones with tequila), meal-sized salads, and platters of relatively simple but flavorful Mediterranean food. For more substantial and intricately structured meals, diners head next door to Casa, where tables spill out onto an outdoor terrace during clement weather. Here, the flavors and aesthetics of Italy emerge in the form of dishes which include cavatelli pasta with seafood, grilled sea wolf with roasted potatoes, different preparations of chicken and veal, and platters piled high with variations of salmon served with a honey-mustard-dill sauce.
