Meals and Restaurants
All restaurants display their menus and prices by the door, as well as their Ruhetag , the day they are closed. Hot meals are usually served throughout the day, but certainly where it says durchgehend warme Kuche . The Gaststatte, Gasthaus, Gasthof, Brauhaus or Wirtschaft establishments, which are the nearest equivalents to old-fashioned English inns, mostly belong to a brewery and function as social meeting points, drinking havens and cheap restaurants combined. Their style of cuisine is known as gutburgerliche Kuche ; this resembles hearty German home cooking (hence the comparatively low prices), and portions are almost invariably generous. Most of these places have a hard core of regular customers who sit at tables marked Stammtisch ; unless invited to do so, it's not the done thing to sit there. However, don't be surprised if you're expected to share your table with strangers - in all but the poshest of restaurants, customers are often asked to give up free seats at their table at busy times. The bulk of the menu is the same all day long, though some establishments offer two- or three-course lunches at a bargain price. Standards are amazingly high: you're far less likely to be served a dud meal in any German restaurant than in almost any other country. Starters tend to be fairly unsophisticated - either a salad, pate or cold meat dish, or, more commonly, soup. Choice for soup is fairly restricted, and tends to be based on an adaptation of foreign fare; prices are usually in the range of DM4-8/2-4. Among the most popular are Gulaschsuppe , a liquidized version of the staple Magyar dish (despite often being dignified as "Ungarische", it's not something a Hungarian would recognize); Bohnensuppe , which is often quite spicy, and derived from the Serbian model; and Zwiebelsuppe , which is a direct copy of the famous French brown-onion soup, usually with floating cheese and croutons. In east Germany, you'll also find Soljanka , a spicy Ukrainian soup with sliced sausages. More authentically German are the clear soups with dumplings, of which the Bavarian Leberknodelsuppe is the best known. Main courses in all German restaurants are overwhelmingly based on pork . As a rule, this is of noticeably higher quality than in Britain, and the variety in taste wrought by using different sauces (it's quite common to find a choice of up to twenty different types) and unexpected parts of the animal means that the predominance of the pig is far less tedious than might be supposed. As an alternative to the ubiquitous Schnitzel, try Schweinehaxe or Eisbein , respectively the grilled (or roasted) and boiled versions of pig's knuckles. Sausages regularly feature on the menu, with distinct regional varieties. Whereas a main-course pork-based dish is likely to cost DM20/10 or less, one with beef will cost a fair bit more. As is the case with snack bars, chicken dishes are comparatively cheap. Many restaurants have a game menu, with more exotic poultry such as duck or goose, along with venison, rabbit and hare; prices then tend to be DM25/12.50 or more. Outside northern Germany, where a wide variety of newly caught salt-water fish is readily available, you'll probably have to be content with fresh-water varieties if you want to eat fish - except in June and July, when restaurants all over the country offer special menus featuring young herring ( Matjes ). Trout is by far the most popular fresh-water fish, though there's obviously a greater choice in places close to lakes and rivers. Where salt-water fish is generally available, the unfamiliar rosefish ( Rotbarsch ) - similar in taste to whiting - is generally the most reliable. Oddlyenough, you're far more likely to encounter a choice of fresh fish in east Germany, where there remain many privatized survivors from the long-established Gastmahl des Meeres chain. The main-course price invariably includes vegetables . Potatoes are usually sauteed, pureed or made into a cold salad. Boiled potatoes, often garnished with parsley, are increasingly popular, but baking, mashing and oven-roasting find little favour. Dumplings made from potatoes and flour are a common alternative. Cabbage is the other popular accompaniment - the green variety is pickled as Sauerkraut , whereas the red is normally cooked with apple as Apfelrotkohl . Salads of lettuce, cucumber, beetroot, carrots and gherkins are often included as a side-dish. From April to late June, when asparagus is in season, many restaurants have a special menu ( Spargelkarte ) of dishes - both vegetarian and carnivore - with this vegetable as a key ingredient. The noodles known as Spatzle and Maultaschen are a distinctive component of Swabian cuisine, occasionally adopted elsewhere. Because so many Germans go to cafes for their daily helping of cakes, desserts in restaurants are an anticlimax, where they exist at all. The Bavarian Dampfnudel is one of the few distinctive dishes; otherwise there's just the usual selection of fresh and stewed fruits, cheeses and ice creams. Germany has a wide variety of ethnic restaurants . The density of these is very much in line with the general Gastarbeiter influx, and there's a heavy southern European bias. Of these, the Italian are generally the best; there are also plenty offering Balkan, Greek and Turkish cuisines. Chinese restaurants are also ubiquitous and usually very consistent, with most offering good-value set lunches. On the other hand, Indian and Thai food is often toned down, largely because few Germans care for hot spices.
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