World’s oldest vegetarian restaurant in the heart of Zurich
Haus Hiltl’s century old tradition have introduced generations of Swiss and Europeans “ a gourmet temple of healthy indulgence” combining Indian, Asian, Mediterranean and Swiss influence to make a rich ratatouille of vegetarian options beyond the usual potatoes, recognised by Guinness World Records.
The restaurant’s downstairs you have informal pay-by-weight buffet and the first floor a-la-carte restaurant with white table cloths, expansive Swiss windows and an entire wall of cookbook shelves and in the past decade the Hilti brand has expanded to eight branches across Zurich.
Zurich’s German-influenced cuisine has always been hearty pork and veal dishes of which Zurcher geschnetzeltes – a creamy veal ad mushroom dish. The Swiss elites often mocked Hiltl as “herbivores” and “grazers” as the Swiss culinary heritage was typically made of meat, a trend linked to income as much as culinary preference and meat-free ingredients were limited to little more than potatoes, root vegetables and cheese.
The founder of Hiltl was a travelling German tailor named Ambrosius Hiltl who had a severe rheumatoid arthritis, a bad bout of rheumatism, made the Bavarian-born to give up meat or he would have died prematurely. In those days meat-free meals were hard to find so the 24-year-old tailor wondered into the one place where he knew he’d find them, the Vegetarierheim and Abstinence-Café, Zurich’s only vegetarian restaurant dubbed the root bunker by locals.
Ambrosius fell in love with the vegetarian dishes and claimed rapid recovery, and jumped at the chance to take over ownership of the ailing restaurant in 1904, married the café’s cook Martha Gneupei, shortly after renamed the place Haus Hiltl.
At the same time, Dr Maximilian Bircher-Benner opened up a health sanatorium in the foothills outside Zurich who was advocating healing powers of nutrition with meat-free diet and invented new iconic Swiss breakfast food muesli.
Initially Haus Hiltl struggled financially in its early years, and was not until 1951, that the current restaurant really took shape which saw Ambrosius’ daughter-in-law Margrith travelled to Delhi as Switzerland’s official delegate to the World Vegetarian Congress and fell in love with Indian flavours, retuning bags of spices like coriander, cardamom, turmeric and cumin. Margrith began to cook some of Switzerland’s only Indian-accented dishes for diners by special request from her private kitchen in Haus Hiltl.
Margrith trained her kitchen staff how to prepare her dishes and attracted a stream of Indian guests and celebrities including former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Swissair even approached Haus Hiltl to become the official provider of vegetarian meals.
Several Margrith pioneered dishes were believed to be too exotic for a meat-loving Swiss public who were used to boiled potatoes, cheese and salads. The restaurant dishes includes Thali platter, a variety of curries served with ginger raita, mango pickles, coconut chutney and boiled rice, crispy poppadums and paratha or nan, and Banana Madras which comes with a zing of mango and a sprinkling of raw cashews.
The current owner Rolf Hiltl, great grandson of Haus Hiltl promoted the restaurant’s philosophy of “healthy indulgence” by opening “the Hiltl Academy” on the fifth floor of Haus Hiltl in 2015, where food-lovers and professional chefs can take vegan and vegetarian cooking classes and even a course dedicated to Margrith’s Indian-inspired dishes. Rolf also released a series of vegetarian cookbooks and opened Switzerland’s first vegetarian “butcher” next door to Haus Hiltl, which serves slices and slabs of tofu, seitan and Tempeh as well as ever popular Haus Hilti delicacies like their Zurcher Geschnetzeltes and aubergine tartare. They even plan to open a flagship restaurant in either Bew York or Los Angeles in the near future.