Eating Austria's Borderlands: Cheese in the West, Goose in the East

The Bregenzerwald: a cheese route, not a single cheese

The Bregenzerwald, the high valley behind Bregenz in Austria's westernmost state, has produced Alpine cheese on the same seasonal rhythm for centuries: cattle move up to high summer pastures (Alpen) each June, milk from those pastures goes into wheels of cheese aged in valley dairies through the winter, and the whole cycle repeats. The Käsestraße Bregenzerwald, a dedicated cheese route connecting dozens of small producers, dairies and mountain huts across the valley, lets visitors follow that cycle directly — watching cheese being made at a working Sennerei, tasting wheels at different ages from the same dairy, and eating in restaurants that build their entire menu around the valley's own cheese rather than importing standard Austrian fare.

Vorarlberger Bergkäse, the valley's signature hard mountain cheese, is aged for months to develop a firm texture and a nutty, slightly sharp flavour that intensifies with time — young wheels are mild enough for everyday eating, while wheels aged a year or more are treated as a genuine delicacy. Käsknöpfle, Vorarlberg's own take on the Alpine cheese-and-dumpling dish found in various forms across the wider Alpine region, layers small egg dumplings with the valley's own cheese and fried onions, and is the dish most likely to appear on any Bregenzerwald menu regardless of the season.

Why the Bregenzerwald looks different too

The cheese route runs through villages — Andelsbuch, Schwarzenberg, Bezau among them — known for a distinctive contemporary wooden architecture tradition that sits deliberately alongside centuries-old farmhouses rather than replacing them, a design movement specific enough to this one valley that it draws architecture tourism independent of the cheese. The combination is not a coincidence: both the building tradition and the cheese-making are expressions of the same valley culture, one that has consistently chosen to modernise on its own terms rather than adopt a generic Alpine-resort look, and a Käsestraße visit tends to take in both in the same afternoon.

Burgenland: cooking shaped by the Hungarian border

Burgenland, Austria's easternmost state, only became fully Austrian after a 1921 plebiscite split what had been western Hungary, and its food still carries that history directly: paprika, goose and game dishes with a genuinely Hungarian accent appear on Burgenland menus in a way found nowhere else in Austria. Gänsebraten, roast goose traditionally served around St. Martin's Day in November, is Burgenland's signature dish, typically with red cabbage and bread or potato dumplings, and the tradition is taken seriously enough that whole villages build a weekend around the season's first roasts.

Game features heavily too, drawing on Burgenland's forests and the Seewinkel plain's open landscape — venison and wild boar dishes, often finished with a paprika-forward sauce closer to Hungarian goulash traditions than to any other Austrian region's cooking, reflect a genuinely distinct culinary lineage rather than a regional variation on standard Austrian fare. Freshwater fish from the Neusiedler See area, particularly pike-perch (Zander), rounds out a plate that leans toward the lake and the plain rather than the mountains that define food further west.

Two borderlands, two different pressures

Vorarlberg and Burgenland arrived at their distinct food identities from opposite directions — Vorarlberg's cuisine developed from genuine geographic isolation, a high Alpine valley economically and culturally oriented as much toward Switzerland as toward the rest of Austria, while Burgenland's developed from a shared, only recently divided history with Hungary, a border that used to run through the middle of a single culinary region rather than between two distinct ones. Together they're the clearest evidence that "Austrian food" was never really one cuisine, any more than the mountains in the west and the flat Pannonian plain in the east are really one landscape.