During the Anschluss, Fred Barschak's father Aaron ran the Restaurant-Hotel Barschak in Vienna's Leopoldstadt:

The building still exists. Right next to the Prater, the great playground. But when I went back 25 years later I was disappointed. It's lost all its charm.

At the time there were maybe 40 kosher restaurants in the area. Three different categories. Some had very good food & were hardly kosher at all. Some were kosher but the food was... ‘unessbar’: uneatable. One or two managed to combine good food & kashrut, & ours was one of them. 

Us & Schreiber: so kosher that when tens of thousands of Galician Jews fleeing the Russian armies in WW1 came through Vienna, the one thing they knew if they wanted to be kosher, they came to either Schreiber or Barschak. Neugroschl may also have been kosher. I’m not 100% sure.

Restaurants in Vienna & all over the continent stayed open on Shabbat. This is how. The staff were non-Jewish on Shabbat. The method was used all over Vienna & in Berlin & Lemberg in Poland. 

We had a regular clientele, known as the Stammgasts. We had markers, I remember them. 8 sides, bronze & numbered. Every table had a number. 

If Mr Cohen came in & had a meal on Shabbat, there was a box—there were maybe 80 boxes—& a little marker was put into that box & that meant that on Sunday, when father did the accounts, he'd send out a bill to Mr Cohen whose address he knew. Or in fact he didn’t have to because Mr Cohen usually either paid before or afterwards. 

As to the casual visitors, my father always took a chance. If somebody wanted a meal on Shabbat, he got it even if he hadn’t paid. He hardly ever lost any money.

The restaurant was busiest on Shabbat. Friday night you had a full menu. A choice of stuffed carp, six other hors d’oeuvres at least. Friday night, it was usually only one soup: chicken soup with whatever you wanted in it. Then then they could have roast chicken, roast duck. Braised beef, which we called Gedämpftes Fleisch. We had about 14 entrees. 

Shabbat it was more limited. The fish was always there. The gefilte fish, the stuffed carp, & above all stuffed Hecht, pike, which is a labour of love. It is a schwere Arbeit, you know."

To bake a stuffed pike this is what you have to do: you have to take the pike in your left hand, use a very sharp fishmonger’s knife here, go around getting the skin away from the flesh & you peel the skin of this long fish as if it were a stocking. It could take 20 minutes. You mustn’t pierce the skin because if you do you’ll have to sew it up. You get all the flesh away & you keep the bone. From the flesh you make the minced fish & you never have just the pike. 

Gefillte fish is always better when it’s made from three fish. You choose what you want. You usually choose whiting. Mackerel is not good. Funnily enough, hake is quite good, makes more jelly. Then you have a recipe: onions, almonds, a little salt, pepper & certainly sugar if you come from Galicia. And then you mix the fish & you put the fish into the stocking. Separately, with the bones & whatever else, you make a stock & in that stock, which takes ¾ of an hour at least, you poach the fish in a fish kettle very, very gently for 2¼ hours. Then you do have a gefilte fish. That’s why it’s called gefilte fish [stuffed fish]. 

It’s not the balls that you get in England. And the Cholent. It was different at Barschak. Hungarian Jews put in—in addition to all the normal ingredients of Cholent—some smoked meat: geräuchertes fleisch. A very special flavour. That's what Barschak’s was known for.