Z’SOM

Z’SOM, Vienna, Austria. A restaurant built around Latin American cuisine shaped by the chef’s Chilean heritage. The atmosphere is casual with an open kitchen. The seats are presented in a unique way that everyone is facing the kitchen. Service is warm but sometimes disjointed. Holding a one Michelin star, a single tasting menu is the offer. Every dish comes with a story and plenty of talk about technique, ingredients and complexity but very little of that seems to translate onto the plate. The flavours feel surprisingly muted and linear. There’s precision but not much depth, tension or evolution as you eat. I kept waiting for a dish to reveal another layer or leave a lasting impression, yet most of them seem to stay on a single note. It’s not that the food is bad. It just feels as though the intellectual complexity is doing more work on form than the actual eating experience.