Frommer's Review
This is one of Zurich's most famous restaurants, and it also serves some of the best cuisine. This celebrity favorite has attracted such greats as Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Joan Miró, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Dior, Richard Strauss, and Igor Stravinsky. More recent guests have included Plácido Domingo, Catherine Deneuve, and Yves Saint-Laurent.
The restaurant is in a five-story, gray Biedermeier building with gold crowns above the six windows on the first floor. Traditional Swiss cuisine and international dishes are served in the two dining rooms. The decor includes original paintings by Klee, Chagall, Matisse, Miró, Kandinsky, Braque, Bonnard, and Picasso. Each was acquired, inexpensively, by the restaurant's early 20th-century founder and reigning matriarch, often based on the advice of her son, an artist and dilettante who fled from Zurich for other, more bohemian refuges in Paris. It's rumored that the mother-son team behind the art collection at Kronenhalle provided the arguments that eventually persuaded Surrealistic Marc Chagall to design the stained-glass windows within Zurich's Fraumünster Church. Regional specialties are served on a trolley and include smoked pork with lentils and bollito misto (boiled beef, chicken, sausage, and tongue). For a main dish, try shredded calves' liver with rösti or filet of sole baked with olives and tomatoes. You may also enjoy bündnerfleisch -- thinly sliced, smoked, dried beef. This is one of the most outstanding and consistently reliable restaurants in Zurich. In the Kronenhalle Bar the specialty is the Ladykiller.
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