By Viktoria Rajnak

After-work drinks at L'Evento in Geneva

L'Evento, Geneva

I’m always keeping my eyes open for new places to go to, and this time it was a nice discovery of something that stands out from the ordinary. I find the surroundings of a place as important a part of the experience as the food. L’Evento is an Italian restaurant/lounge/bar that lies a stone’s throw from the city center. After work stops: at 18:00, Monday through Friday.

L’Evento is in a glass veranda with great heights, situated between two buildings.

iPads for the bar at Levento

The bar is at the entrance level, overlooking the restaurant, and when you walk down to the restaurant level, another bar desk is filled with iPads! I’m guessing it’s the entertainment while waiting for placement, or if you drop by alone.

Instead of studying the menu, I studied the design of this place. The enormous lamps are in the shape of jellyfish.

The chairs are Kartell Mademoiselle with Missoni Fabric. The kitchen is framed and visible for us to peek into. On this live painting you see the chefs’ movements.

The fabulous drinks made a great end to my Monday. They were accompanied by a plate of Italian charcuterie and cheese. After-work was nice, and next time I’ll test lunch, or a late weekend night when there’s a DJ around.

Grazie Mille!

Restaurant L’Evento
50, rue du Stand
1205 Genève

Viktoria Rajnak is a business student at HEC in Geneva, where she has lived since 2003. She writes a blog, Remove Before Flight Blog and she will be contributing occasional guest posts here on a variety of topics including nightlift and shopping in Geneva.

Hold Up Art (photo:Hold Up Art)

By Viktoria Rajnak

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – When I was just a teenager, I used to hang out at with friends at the Carpe Diem Café, in the heart of Geneva. We would meet there in the afternoons, but mostly on weekend nights. There were DJs with fresh and new music, a party mood that was always charged and each time was a great time. A couple of years later, I walk into what has replaced it, Hold Up Art, which recently opened.

Standing at the door: I am filled with nostalgic emotions but curious to see the transformation.

The first impression doesn’t disappoint me. A small terrace at the entrance works perfectly well in wintertime, you can smoke shishas covered up in a blanket if you want to. Inside the music is blasting and the lights blinding. It’s like a mini-club with tables and a bar full of people. Hold Up Art is a bar/art lounge of its own style, inspired by Pop Art and Street Art. Other cities they plan to expand to are Paris, London and Dubai.

The pieces of art on display are for sale and new ones come in every month. The ceiling painting is renewed every six months. The interior is in constant change of decoration, and it’s what makes this place exciting to return to. Hold Up want to promote new talents so the DJs are renewed even more frequently than the pieces of art. Everything about it is original, the cage-like DJ booth, shots in what resembles a rack filled with test tubes and the displays downstairs. The place is also available for private events and catering.

The contemporary art all over the place is closely matched by a contemporary attitude making good use of social media: a nice homepage, a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Finally someone who is going with the mainstream flow!

The spirit as described on the homepage: “Pass by and see for yourself, weekly new DJ’s, saxo’s, shishas, shots and EVERY DAY WE SHUFFLING !!!”

Hold Up Art

Rue du port 4 , 1204 , Geneva
Homepage: http://www.holdupart.org
Twitter: @HoldUpArtLounge

Ed. note: We’ve now moved this post to Jonell Galloway’s food blog on GenevaLunch, “The Rambing Epicure.” You’ll find this and much more on buying, cooking, eating at home and dining out from our food expert! Be sure to visit soon.

Ed. note: We’ve now moved this post to Jonell Galloway’s food blog on GenevaLunch, “The Rambling Epicure.” (note, 2011: now the blog Savouring Switzerland) You’ll find this and much more on buying, cooking, eating at home and dining out from our food expert! Be sure to visit soon.

Ed. note: We’ve now moved this post to Jonell Galloway’s food blog on GenevaLunch, “The Rambing Epicure.” You’ll find this and much more on buying, cooking, eating at home and dining out from our food expert! Be sure to visit soon.

It all began innocently enough, my addiction to the confections of Tristan, the maitre chocolatier of the minuscule village of Bougy-Villars, in the hills above Rolle, just next to Signal de Bougy.

After all, who on this earth doesn’t love chocolate? And isn’t one of the prime pleasures of living in – or in my case, near – Switzerland that you get to indulge in  some of the world’s finest, anywhere, anytime you please? It’s the rare place in the world where you can get your fix in, of course, the finest boutiques in big cities like Geneva, but also on supermarket shelves, in tiny-but-luxurious shops, even in the gas station.

A considerate friend left a little white shopping bag very discreetly on my doorknob one day last December when I was out. I thought all the usual appreciative platitudes: It was my birthday, she remembered, how sweet …

Until I opened the bag, saw the three innocent-looking chocolate bars, wrapped very plainly in see-through cellophane, and nonchalantly began to munch.

What revelation was there!

What my friend had chosen for me was three of Tristan’s thick, plain, unadorned plaques, studded with big chunks of nut. You can choose from caramelized pistachios, hazelnuts, or walnuts, and you can take your pick of dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or  white chocolate. As always with chocolate, I am embarrassed to say that I vastly prefer the milk to any other type.

I say "embarrassed" because among choco-cognoscenti, chocolat noir is supposed to be the thing,  the top, the crème de la crème. Call me foolish, call me unsophisticated, but it’s not for me. However, if it’s for you, Tristan’s got plenty to make you happy, with a choice of 50% chocolat noir and 83% chocolat noir (the latter for those who like their drugs extremely strong!). 

What else does his tiny gem of a shop have to offer? There are elegant tablets of chocolate, studded with crunchy cocoa nibs, and slender batons of chocolate, plus gorgeous, artful packages and baskets for holidays such as Christmas and Mother’s Day, and truffes in a multiplicity of flavors ranging from the traditional (coffee, caramel, rum, champagne) to the cutting edge of the chocolatier’s art (green tea, whisky, even the eau-de-vie marc) The color of the green tea truffes alone is enough to let you know that you’re in no ordinary chocolate shop.

Best of all, small tasting samples of nearly everything are scattered in little dishes around the shop, so you can be an informed consumer, spending your francs and your calories wisely. Since a single hyper-addictive nut-studded plaque runs CHF10, a stop at Tristan’s can quickly add up. But although your bank balance and your hips may suffer, it’s well worth it, for a visit to Tristan’s is a little stopover in choco-heaven.

Tristan, Artisan-Chocolatier, Bougy-Villars, Switzerland; 021 807 21 25; www.chocolatier-tristan.ch

If you have a favorite market, shop, product, café, bar, or restaurant, or if you’re looking for a favorite item and can’t find it, let me know.

When I first moved here, in among the discoveries of the joys of lait cru cheese and good wine available for a song, was a completely unexpected revelation: tuna mayonnaise.

You’ve probably passed it right by on the supermarket shelf: those shelves of Thomy tubes full of mayonnaise, mustard, tomato purée, and even chicken liver paté. But the star of this particular show, as far as I’m concerned, is the tuna mayo. It might sound suspicious at first, but give it a try.

Just take a piece of dark bread, squinch a little squiggle out onto the bread, throw on a slice of Comté or Gruyere or some other hard cheese, maybe top it all off with a slice of cucumber, and voilà. Fast food, but very far from the MacDo idea of speed!

If you work at home, as I do, or simply have an office fridge and not much time, this is a culinary lifesaver. Some may balk at the idea, and when I smuggled a tube to a US friend, she confessed to have tried it, let it linger in her refrigerator for some months, and then eventually chucked it. But another friend, when she heard of my impending summer visit, was quick to say: "Oh lord, don’t forget the tuna mayo. What’s in that stuff, anyway? Crack?"

And thus was born our new nickname for our favorite product: Crack Mayo.

I’m not sure Thomy would approve, but I’m addicted.

If you have a favorite market, shop, product, café, bar, or restaurant, or if you’re looking for a favorite item and can’t find it, give me a shout.

Photo, courtesy Nestlé

More chocolate festival photos in the GenevaLunch "Versoix, Switzerland Chocolate Festival" photo album.

"Go on, only a few hundred calories!"

Paradise if you love the stuff and don’t have to worry about your weight, but purgatory if you do.

Everywhere you turn in this annual festival there are stall holders offering their wares, tempting visitors with plates of little squares of chocolate, all too good to resist.

There are also vendors with chocolate fish, chocolate rabbits, chocolate fountains, chocolate for children, dark rich chocolate for adults sold in dark, rich sophisticated boxes. Cakes with chocolate, ice cream with chocolate, chocolate covered apricots, chocolate in boxes from every cocoa bean producing country in the world. A chocoholics delight.

This annual chocfest in Versoix is very popular, so it is also very busy. The queue for the free visit to the Faverger chocolate factory was so long I couldn’t be bothered to wait. Maybe I missed the sight of Oompa Loompas operating the machinery or sailing on rivers of chocolate, but never mind.

There are other attractions laid on for visitors such as a "choco" train, balloons, food stands, and the obligatory Swiss band to entertain the crowds. This is a good day out for a family albeit a bit of a chaotic one. The chocolate tents can get quite squashed at peak times, so I would advise next year go early to enjoy it at its best. This way you can try all the varieties on offer in peace, even if you have to live off salad for the following few days.

‘Tis the season of the office party. A chance to let one’s hair down, to share inhouse jokes, a meal, a few drinks and recount embarrassing work moments from the previous year.

However if you work from home you don’t get to participate in this annual event. The only contact you have with other professionals is in a virtual world via email, or at best, the sound of a voice at the end of a phone line.

For some, NOT having to go to a party is a godsend, a welcome relief from bad taste jokes, the delights of drunken colleagues and having to wear a paper party hat. But for those that don’t want to miss out on the yuletide fun, the answer is to organize your own night out.

So just before Christmas a group of us from Nyon got together and held our own "not the office" night out. In the group were writers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, editors, journalists, consultants in health care, environment and other professions. All specialists in their own field, all slaving away over their laptops for twelve months and all looking forward to logging off for a few hours. Oh, and we are all women too. It’s not that men weren’t welcome, it’s just that they somehow didn’t make it on to the list.

We began the evening with a pre-dinner drink in Geneva, followed by delicious food at an Indian restaurant in the centre of town.There was the obligatory "Secret Santa" present giving, a little bit of networking perhaps, but all in all we were there to relax and have fun. We didn’t play party games but we did ask each other the following question: If we could invite just two people to dinner who would they be? The criteria included famous or non-famous people they be could dead or still living, a real person or a character from fiction.

There were some varied answers. Some invitees had gravitas, such as Nelson Mandela or Charles Dickens. Somebody chose Victoria Wood (a British female comedian) to liven up events, another the actor/traveller Michael Palin. But when most came to giving their second choice of guest, the overwhelmingly popular vote was Mr George Clooney. More than 60% of of all the professional women round the table that night would choose to have the Hollywood hunk sat round their own. There was someone who broke ranks and said David Beckham would be their favourite, but on the whole, Mr C won out. It was very apparent that if he had driven up over the St Gotthard pass from his villa in Italy to join the party that night, he would have been most, most welcome. 

Wensleydale Cheese, but not as we know it, Gromit

Photo reprinted with permission from Wensleydale Creamery

Eating a typical British meal at Christmas time doesn’t come top of my list in the Yuletide festivities. The fun part of living abroad is to see what other nationalities eat on celebratory occasions. It’s good to mix different countries’ traditions with some British ones.

Over the years I have tasted succulent bar-be-cued steak on Christmas Day in Uruguay, and delicious fish with fabulous Chilean wine on Christmas Eve in Santiago.

I’ve also had fun introducing other people over the world to to the delights of British Christmas crackers (the ones with corny jokes and mottos, not the biscuits).

Here in Nyon we live in an apartment building where our neighbours (I think there are over 20 nationalities in our block) often get together for a drink. Last year they set up a trestle table in the lobby and we all met over a glass of "Vin Chaud".

Conversation turned to what everyone was going to be eating and drinking for Christmas. Neighbours came forward with their traditions.The Polish family on the third floor explained how they serve lots of food over lots of courses, and put hay on the dining table to recreate a manger.

When it came to my turn I explained that Brits usually like to eat roast turkey with cranberry sauce, which can of course be tasty, but what really makes Christmas for me is a good sized chunk of Wensleydale Cheese. I then bemoaned the fact that I hadn’t got any as I forgot to ask anyone to bring any over from England, and I’d left it far too late to order some.

I then started to extoll the delights of Wensleydale cheese and how I was going to miss the crumbly, creamy delight. My neighbours’ faces went blank.

As I was born in Yorkshire and most of my relatives still live in the Dales, I then went on misty eyed about limestone walls, beautiful scenery and the cows dotted about the landscape and how their rich milk is a crucial contribution to the cheese.

I continued about the texture of Wensleydale, how it makes a perfect accompaniment to Christmas cake. There was no stopping me.

But then I saw the faces now looked even blanker, and nobody had any idea what I was talking about. So I stopped reminiscing and gave everyone the obvious frame of reference, Wallace and Gromit.

A Swiss neighbour looked at me and said, "Ah yes! now I remember from the film!"

I got excited, "So you know what I am referring to then?

He replied, "Hmm, I don’t think they managed to translate ‘Wensleydale’ into Swiss French. I think they said ‘Gruyère‘ instead.

Crikey.

Wallace would be mortified.