They came for Bratwurst mit Bürli. They came for Rivella lemonade, “the Coca-Cola of Switzerland.” They came for Wurzel bread and raclette and green bottles, the hard-to-find-in-America ones with malt and hops and “Quöllfrisch” stamped in blue above a painting of green hills rolling into distant, snow-dusted peaks.
They trickled in wearing red jerseys and red hats on a bright Sunday afternoon to Stable DC, the District’s “first Swiss American restaurant,” founded last year by two Swiss chefs who grew up in the foothills of the Alps and worked together in kitchens in Dubai, Ireland and New York before ending up here.
“A lot of people don’t understand what Swiss food and drink is and what it means,” said Silvan Kraemar, one of the chefs. “We are confused for Sweden a lot. We’re influenced by German, French and Italian, but we have Swiss food. We’re proud [of it].”
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As the crowd filtered to the private bar in the back for the national team’s World Cup-opening match against Brazil, the chefs, David Fritsche and Kraemer, flew around the restaurant, checking everything. The upholstery fashioned from wool Swiss army blankets was clean. The TVs were on the right channel. The fun facts in the bathroom — Roger Federer and LSD were both created in Switzerland — were fun.
Kraemer seemed to pause only once, when he beamed at an embassy employee crayoning the red-and-white flag onto cheeks all shapes and colors.
Across the room, Laurent Widmer, an adviser to the Swiss executive director at the World Bank, stood with his son in the sea of red and couldn’t help but smile.
“I don’t know so much about soccer,” he said, “but I like speaking and drinking with my colleagues.”
The beer tasted a little warmer, though, when the mighty Brazilians, a tournament favorite, nabbed the lead 20 minutes in. The fans in red remained quiet as the first half bled into the second. The clock wound down, the room got hotter. The Swiss and their drinks sweated.
In the 50th minute, as the crayoned cheeks began to run, Swiss forward Steven Zuber snapped a header to level the game at 1. The bar erupted. Quöllfrisches spilled. Free shots of Braulio, an herbal amaro from an Alpine region in northern Italy bordering Switzerland, appeared from nowhere.
One pocket of the room raised their glasses, chorused “Hopp Suisse!” and drained them.
“Tastes like Robitussin,” one man coughed into his red kit.
A few steps away, another man heard him and, almost to himself, said, “Tastes like home.”
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