German restaurants closing? Ach du lieber…

Well, Jacob Wirth’s – Boston’s last (only ever? only since the aptly-named Wursthaus in Cambridge closed twenty years ago?) German restaurant is up for sale. If and when it closes, it will be one of those non-loss losses. I sort of liked the idea of it – after all, where else could you go if you wanted to find exactly what a restaurant looked and smelled like in 1868 – but I hadn’t been there in years. Although I’m half-German, I wouldn’t exactly say that German food is my thing.

There was little that my mother cooked that was German. My father (the Irishman) was pretty much a plain meat and potatoes guy. My mother made great soups that were sort of German-y, but her one mitteleuropa dish chicken goulash (a.k.a., chicken paprikash) may have owed as much to her family’s having lived in the Austro-Hungarian empire, rather than to Germany itself.

She did do some German baking: kipferl, strudel, stollen. And at Christmas my grandmother sent German baked goods: all of the above, plus lead-weight tasteless white cookies, glazed and with sprinkles, and bitter currant cookies the heft of a hockey puck, if hockey pucks were made out of dried wood shavings and sawdust.

Grandma also sent her home made pickles, and some other pickled stuff I didn’t eat (cabbage?). And my Uncle Jack would send along the occasional summer sausage, a smelly salami like thing encased in what appeared to be a Goodyear tire. Since the one Euro ethnic group that Worcester didn’t seem to have much of was German, Jack must have felt my mother couldn’t find any good old Chicago German summer sausage there.

Bottom line: I didn’t grow up eating German food, and I never developed a particular hankering for it.

I’ve been to Germany a few times, and found the food okay. You can definitely avoid the worst of the wurst. The only really dreadful dinner item I came across on my travels there was chicken stuffed with rice – that I had been able to divine from the non-tourist (i.e. no English) menu. Sounds pretty innocuous, you say? Well, I hadn’t counted on the non-mention of the innards of the chicken having been coated with liverwurst. Another god-awful thing encountered on the same trip came from a smoothie menu in our hotel. They all sounded pretty yummy until I came to the one that combined sauerkraut, beet juice, and lemon juice. Nein danke.

Anyway, the end of Jake’s is just part of a larger trend, in which German restaurants are closing all over the country, even in really German towns, like Milwaukee, where Karl Ratzch – “a Milwaukee institution: Frank Lloyd Wright, Liberace and President Nixon dined there” (presumably not together).

 All across the country, German restaurants are calling it quits. In Portland, Ore., Der Rheinlander closed after 53 years in 2016. Another Portland restaurant, the Berlin Inn, closed and reopened as the Brooklyn House, with a vegan and gluten-free menu of “European comfort food,” before closing again permanently. (Source: Washington Post)

Serves the Brooklyn House right. After all, nothing says “European comfort food” like vegan and gluten-free.

Outside of Boulder, Colo., the Black Forest Restaurant closed last summer after 59 years. The Olde German Schnitzel House in Hickory, N.C., served its last sauerkraut in 2014, lasting 10 years. One of Nashville’s oldest restaurants, Gerst Haus, died last month after 62 years. That’s 10 years longer than the Chicago Brauhaus, which closed in December.

Frankly, what strikes me as odd here is how young those restaurants were. I would associate German restaurants with the big waves of German immigration in the late nineteen hundreds, not with more recent (i.e., my lifetime) decades. Jake Wirth’s opened in 1868. Lüchow's, the famous and long-defunct German restaurant in NYC, opened in the 1880’s and made it to its 100th anniversary. Chicago’s Berghoff  - last I looked. still in business – began life in 1898.

It’s kind of surprising to me that someone would have opened a German restaurant in 2004.

Of equal surprise was survey cited in that WaPo article that found that 7 percent of respondents reported that “they ate German food at least once a month.” 61 percent eating Italian; 50 percent Mexican, 36 percent Chinese – that I can all believe. But 7 percent eating German food? Were they counting Bud and pretzels? Gummi bears?

German food’s decline “reflects the cultural mix of this country toward more Latin American, Asian and African American culture, and less of the mainstay Germanic culture that influenced this country for many decades,” said Arnim von Friedeburg, an importer of German foods and the founder of Germanfoods.org. “The cultural shift is going on, and German culture has to fight or compete to keep its relevance.”

If I were going to fight for German cultural relevance, I think I’d skip the food and move over to literature and classical music.

Then there’s the fact that German food is kind of boring. Kind of white and brown. Kind of heavy.

The good news is that, while German restaurants are closing recht and links, biergartens are doing well. Some have tried to incorporate German food into their biergarten mix, but one place that tried to introduce beef tongue with asparagus and capers had to dump it from the menu and slot in “kale-quinoa salad and tahini-avocado toast.” (And, no, that place wasn’t in a Brooklyn, it was in San Francisco. So close. Me? I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want tongue with asparagus and capers…)

I will almost miss Jake Wirth’s, but that’s mostly for the memories and not the food.

Auf wiedersehen, pigs knuckles. Auf wiedersehen, sawdust on the floor (and probably in half the meals)…