Zum Alten Stephan

Friedhofplatz 10 Cuisines: European

About

This restaurant is the finest in this region of Switzerland. Parts of the structure that contain this place were built 1,000 years ago as housing for the staff of a nearby chapel, St. Stephan's Kappelle. Later it functioned as the point of demarcation from which most of the streets of Solothurn were laid out. Today it's the oldest restaurant in the canton and the most charming and amusing place in town, with two distinctly separate venues, menus, and price scales. We usually prefer the simpler, street-level dining room, where varnished pine, marble floors, bare-wood tables, and oil paintings in gilded frames provide an uncluttered dignity. Upstairs is a smaller, more intimate and hushed ambience where the cuisine is more thoughtful and cerebral (and more fussed over) than in the brasserie. Menu items in the brasserie include several kinds of rösti, which many locals consider a meal in itself. According to your wishes, it will include any combination of ham, onions, cheese, bacon, and fried eggs. There's also pasta, salads, soups, meat, and fish. Upstairs, look for such dishes as Scottish salmon in puff pastry with broad beans and soy sauce, duck breast with white asparagus, Parmesan ravioli in a spinach pasta wrapper, filet of U.S. beef served with vegetables and wild mushrooms, and such desserts as four-fruit sorbet with fresh berries.