Travel

October is an exciting month to be eating in any good restaurant in Europe, although the reasons for this are not immediately obvious. There are no Christmas decorations, the outdoor tables have been put away, and this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau has still to arrive.

The change in October is subtle, and confined principally to the menu. The game season has arrived in earnest and kitchens from Scotland to Austria are busy preparing pheasant, partridge, hare, rabbit, wild duck, venison and wild boar.

The game season opened in mid-August when the Scottish and North Yorkshire moors provided the first of this year’s grouse. These invariably expensive but distinctive birds will be on menus until early December when the grouse shooting season ends.

And while the arrival of these game dishes provides a new, seasonal pleasure for the diner, they also represent a series of different challenges for the chef and the restaurateur.

Firstly, game tends to be expensive, not just because it is wild but because it has to be laboriously prepared by the game dealer. As a result, restaurants tend to charge a fixed cash margin for their game dishes rather than multiplying their cost price by three as they do with a breast of chicken or a sirloin steak.

To compensate for this, the best chefs will be looking to supplement what they can charge for a breast of pheasant or a saddle of rabbit by putting on the menu cheaper dishes such as a terrine of rabbit, wild duck and prunes or jugged hare, an old recipe in which the jointed hare is slowly cooked in a litre of good red wine. The key is not to waste anything.

The other distinctive attraction of game dishes is that however good they taste on their own, they are even better with a bottle of gutsy red wine. Something from the Rhône or Languedoc-Roussillon in France, Piedmont in Italy or Rioja in Spain, areas that are also synonymous with hunting, are often the most suitable.

LONDON
Galvin at Windows (London Hilton, Park Lane, W1, 020 7208 4021, galvinrestaurants.com), which has views across Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace’s gardens, is run by English brothers Chris and Jeff Galvin, with the kitchen under the command of French chef, André Garrett.

The game menu is therefore very strong. It starts with grouse in three ways: plain roasted; with creamed pearl barley and confit cabbage; and as a mousseline in a consommé. Then there are venison, partridge and pheasant.

This is a great venue either to take visitors to or for Londoners to remind themselves just how attractive their city is in the autumn.

PARIS
Gérard Besson (5 rue Coq Héron, +33 1 4233 1474, gerardbesson.com) is an established restaurant, close to Les Halles, that’s still run with military precision by its eponymous chef and his wife, Martine, to the highest of standards. From early October, the right hand side of Besson’s menu simply states, “The hunting season has started,” and then goes on to list 20 different game dishes from Scottish grouse to grey leg partridge to wild boar braised with Corsican herbs.

Besson’s other culinary speciality is cooking with the even more expensive black truffles that also come into season from October.

VIENNA
Steirereck (Stadtpark, +43 1 713 31 68, steirereck.at) is located in the verdant environs of the Stadtpark in downtown Vienna and offers three distinct options: a very relaxed essbar, or food bar; a Meierie section that specialises in milk and dairy, predominantly cheeses; and the restaurant proper. The latter excels in the cooking of Styria, a mountainous region in Austria’s southeast, where a lot of hunting and shooting goes on, particularly of deer. So throughout the winter months venison is consistently on the menu directed by chef Heinz Reitbauer although, because this is Austria, his desserts are not to be missed, either.

EDINBURGH
Monachyle Mhor (Balquhidder, Lochearnhead, Perthshire, 01877 384622, monachylemhor.com), is a family-run hotel and restaurant, where accomplished chef Tom Lewis is ably assisted by his brother and sister. It’s the only place I have eaten in where the phrase “roaming venison” appears on the menu.

This refers to the deer that descend from the hillsides and roam into the nearby gardens before Lewis, as keen a shot as he is chef, is called in to despatch them swiftly before they do any serious damage.

Located in a 2,000-acre estate in the rolling countryside, 60 miles northwest of Edinburgh, this setting brings something magical to eating game. And the whisky is pretty good, too.

British Airways flies to Paris, Vienna and Edinburgh from London. Visit ba.com