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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
We Love Food, Part 1
Johnathan and I like food. Come down to it, I’d say we love it. We don’t love the cooking aspect of it as much as we like the eating, but one is necessary quite often for the other. We make it work.
Lately, we’ve eaten out a bit more often, if only to have something different. Since I moved out here, we’ve had German food once, and to have it, we had to go down to Columbus. I happened upon a mention of a local German restaurant on a Cleveland food blog and it’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. Finally, we decided to find this place and try it out.
To start with, the restaurant looked like a fairly typical, older-style German restaurant, complete with schmaltzy decor. The bar area was fairly nice, so while we attempted to flag someone down to seat us, we were hopeful as to the rest of the meal. The dining room was not as nice as the bar area. The seats were hard and actually quite shallow. The table was small and quite far away from the booth seats, which did not move. Since we were there for the food, I didn’t let this aesthetic aspects bother me.
I started out by having a white ale, which was actually quite good. After further investigation, we discovered that I was drinking a Canadian beer, so that really had no bearing on the fact that it was a German food restaurant. (Or, German-American, I guess. That’s what their menu said.) I ordered the sauerbraten, which came with spaetzel and red cabbage. Johnathan had a sausage platter with bratwurst and knockwurst. We also ordered a side of German potato salad. The dishes were rather pricey ($18 for mine and $17 for his), but this is the kind of pricing I came to expect from the German restaurant that I frequented in Portland. We both ordered the German potato soup for our first “course.” (Tell me, why is it that a German restaurant must append ‘German’ in front of the dish? Isn’t that the point of it being a German restaurant?) The soup was good, though I would have liked it to be a bit spicier. It would have improved it.
Our main dishes came fairly quickly afterward, and I was struck by how cheap everything looked. Looks can, however, be deceiving, so I was still hopeful. My sauerbraten tasted like it was overcooked and then covered in a barely heated sugar-based sauce. I wasn’t overly impressed with it. Suffice it to say that I’ve had better. The red cabbage was good, but I think it would be difficult to do red cabbage poorly. The spaetzel was good as well. Just a touch sweet which I enjoy. Johnathan liked his sausages, though I was wholly unimpressed by both of them. The German potato salad wasn’t very warm and to be perfectly honest, wasn’t very good either. The food, overall, was a disappointment.
I think the worst part was that it took for-ev-er to get our check and finally be able to pay and leave. We had to seek our server out in order to pay the final bill which was much, much higher than the service and food that we got was worth. The fact that this is apparently the only German restaurant in Cleveland is possibly an even bigger disappointment because it means that, unless we go to Columbus (or perhaps to Portland!), we won’t be eating German food. I wouldn’t recommend this restaurant to anyone because it would just leave a poor opinion of German food in general. I promise there’s better German cuisine out there – it just won’t be found at the one in Cleveland.
Next time, I’ll write about our experience at the Indian food restaurant that we went to this evening. I promise the next one will have a happier ending.
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