Zum Goldenen Schäfli

Hand cut tartare in a guild room

Beef tartare is cut to order in mild, medium, or hot versions while Astrit Memetaj, Chef at Zum Goldenen Schäfli in Sankt Gallen, keeps the pass close to the old Swiss repertoire. He has held the head chef post here since 2015, alongside his work at MARIO in Wijdewormer, and the discipline carries across both kitchens: control, balance, and confidence in the ingredient rather than ornament. At the Schäfli, that restraint meets a house with a longer memory than most restaurants can claim. The building began in 1484 as the butchers' guild hall, later becoming a public restaurant in 1798, and the kitchen still works with dishes that suit that lineage: St. Gallen veal sausage, rösti, hackbraten, cheese fondue. Memetaj's Italian register is part of his wider signature, but this station asks for a different kind of steadiness. He answers with clean execution inside a place where the craft is not only on the plate. It is also in the way a protected room can keep feeding a city without turning its age into theatre.

Swiss staples without excess

The program is à la carte, with the kitchen built around regional and seasonal cooking rather than a fixed procession. Tartare gives the bench its most visible gesture: the knife work happens for the order, and the seasoning is set in three levels, mild, medium, or hot. St. Gallen veal sausage arrives with red wine onion sauce, a local form given the attention of a finished plate. Hackbraten comes with mashed potatoes, closer to grandmother's kitchen than to display. Rösti does the work potatoes are meant to do here, crisped and held as a staple rather than treated as a garnish. The menu also makes room for cordon bleu, grilled octopus salad, and chocolate-strawberry mousse, which tells you something about Memetaj's range without pulling the house away from its Swiss center. The wine program stays local in focus and curated in shape, there to support the plate rather than compete with it. This is a kitchen of familiar forms, but familiar is not casual. It demands repetition, heat control, clean sauces, and the patience to leave a dish legible.

The room keeps its slope

The room announces itself through use, not polish. Wood panelling holds the light low; the floor slopes because the old structure sits on soft ground, part of Sankt Gallen's medieval fabric rather than a decorative conceit. Guests feel that angle before they study it. The golden lamb sign over the entrance keeps the butchers' guild in view, and inside, the first-floor restaurant tradition still shapes the experience: a room lifted above the street, intimate in scale, with conversation kept close to the table. The pass works inside that atmosphere rather than against it. Plates of veal sausage, rösti, and tartare move through a setting that has absorbed centuries of civic appetite, from guild use to public restaurant.

A steady post in two kitchens

Memetaj's next chapter is not announced as a change of address. It is the continued management of two stations, with Zum Goldenen Schäfli in Sankt Gallen and MARIO in Wijdewormer held to the same preference for clarity. At Metzgergasse 5, that clarity still has to meet the sloping floor, the wood-panelled room, and the hand cut tartare.