Following our time in Germany, my wife Jun and I spent a few days in Vienna, Austria. While the weather was scorching hot, we still greatly enjoyed navigating this beautiful city from the Belvedere Palace (where Jun’s all-time favorite painting The Kiss by Gustav Klimt is located) to a number of world-renowned museums. While in Vienna, of course, we wanted to check out a few restaurants in the city. Our first stop was a popular wine bar and bistro MAST Weinbistro. I had pretty high expectations after seeing glowing reviews of the place from Reddit and elsewhere. At the end, it was a solid dinner but nothing that quite captivated us.

Since we wanted to explore the full scope of the restaurant’s food and wine offerings, we chose the reasonably priced six-course chef’s choice menu (at €89 per person) and the five-glass wine pairing (at €59 per person). The tasting menu is really just an assortment of dishes from the a la carte section you can select from, consisting of four snacks, one each from the cold dish section, two each from the warm dish section and one each from the dessert section. The snacks were all delicious, focusing on fresh ingredients designed to pair well with wines, like summer squash and apple, sheep’s curd with kohlrabi and smoked carp with focaccia and tomato. For the cold dishes, Jun and I shared burrata with golden beet and radish as well as pork cheek with runner beans and asparagus. Both were OK, but didn’t quite make the progression from the snacks that I was hoping for. We had high expectations for the pork cheek, in particular, but it was the runner beans that actually stole the show from the pork.

The warm dishes were also mostly fine but not super memorable, either. The best of the four dishes we shared was probably the sturgeon with lentils and peas. Zucchini with king oyster mushroom and spinach was also not bad. On the other hand, both meat dishes, veal ossobuco with carrot and medium-rare wild boar with bell pepper, were mostly forgettable. For the desserts, I liked the strawberry ice cream with salted caramel, but the other one, with cherry and original beans chocolate, didn’t leave a strong impression. It probably didn’t help that the portion of the dishes was way more than we had anticipated and we were struggling with finishing the food by the time the warm dishes started arriving.

Getting a reservation at MAST online wasn’t too difficult but it is a popular bistro in Vienna so planning in advance is still recommended. The wine pairing featured wines from relatively unknown producers in different parts of Europe (not just Austria), emphasizing natural and biodynamic bottles. MAST also has its own Blanc de Blancs Sekt sparkling wine. Other than one Spanish white that I had to look up to see if I can buy in the U.S., the wines from the pairing were, like the food, mostly fine but didn’t knock my socks off. I would say the best way to approach MAST is not as a serious dining destination but as a casual place where you can enjoy a glass or two or a bottle with a few dishes for a leisurely night in Vienna. We might’ve enjoyed our time at MAST perhaps more with that goal in mind.

KenScale: 7.75/10 (Jun’s Score: 7.5/10)

Address: Porzellangasse 53, 1090 Wien, Austria

Website: https://www.mast.wine/en/

Reservation via Website