Sit down in a German Gasthaus and the menu runs to forty items, most of them compound nouns of alarming length. None of it is complicated once you know what the words are doing.
The odd part is that the dishes on that menu and the dishes we Germans actually cook at home overlap less than you would think. Restaurant food here is Sunday food: roasts, dumplings, gravy, things that need three hours and a heavy pot. What comes out of our kitchens on a Wednesday is simpler and involves a great many potatoes.
How the eating is organized here, the rhythm and the seasons and where to sit down, is covered on German cuisine. This page is about the food itself.
Three Meals, and Only One of Them Is Hot
Frühstück is bread and rolls with butter, jam, cold cuts, cheese, sometimes a soft-boiled egg, and coffee. On a weekday it takes ten minutes. On a Sunday it can run two hours and pull in half the family.
Mittagessen, the midday meal, is traditionally the hot one and still is in plenty of households. One course, occasionally a soup ahead of it. The old story that we work through two to seven courses at lunch describes a banquet, not a Tuesday.
Then Abendbrot, which is cold again. The pattern is shifting, since a lot of us now eat the hot meal at night, but the vocabulary has not caught up. We still call dinner evening bread.
The Dishes on Every Menu
Schnitzel first, because it is on every menu and because there is a rule about it. A Wiener Schnitzel is veal, full stop, and the German food code says so. Pork prepared the same way has to be called Schnitzel Wiener Art, Viennese style. A German court decided in 2009 that customers here no longer expect veal under the name, which is honest about how the word gets used but does not change what lands on your plate. If the price looks low, it is pork.
Sauerbraten is beef marinated for days in vinegar and spices, then braised slowly. The Rhineland version sweetens the sauce with raisins and crushed gingerbread, which sounds wrong on paper and is one of the best things we do.
Rouladen are thin slices of beef rolled around bacon, onion, mustard, and a pickle, then braised until they surrender. Every family has a version and considers the others slightly off. Königsberger Klopse, veal meatballs in a white caper sauce, come from a city that is no longer German and no longer called Königsberg; the recipe travelled west with the people who had to leave.
The plain fried meatball has more names than anything else we eat. It is a Frikadelle across most of the north and west, a Bulette in Berlin, a Fleischpflanzerl in Bavaria, and a Fleischküchle in Swabia. Same object. Four arguments.
The Sausage System
The count runs well past a thousand kinds, which is a less useful number than the system underneath it. Sausage here falls into three families. Brühwurst is scalded and firm and covers most of what you eat warm. Kochwurst is cooked, and takes in liver sausage and blood sausage. Rohwurst is raw and cured, which is where salami and Mettwurst live. Work out the family and you know how the thing is meant to be handled.
Frankfurter Würstchen are protected by origin, so only sausages made in and around Frankfurt may carry the name. What you get elsewhere is a Wiener, the same idea with a different city attached. Neither should ever be boiled: put them into water that has come off the heat, or the skins split and the flavor goes into the pot.
The one that stops visitors mid-sentence is Mett. Raw minced pork, seasoned with salt and pepper, spread thick on a roll with raw onion over the top, eaten cold. It is an ordinary thing to put out at a party, and at some point somebody will shape it into a hedgehog with onion spines. That is also ordinary. :-)
What Comes on the Side
Kartoffelsalat divides the country. In the north it is bound with mayonnaise and served cold. In the south it is dressed with hot stock, vinegar, and oil, and a Swabian will tell you it has to turn out schlonzig, a word that means more or less what it sounds like.
Here is the part nobody brings up during the argument. The split is recent. Food historians date the first stock-based recipes to around 1850 and mayonnaise later still, and northern kitchens used stock too for a long time. The feud is younger than the faith.
Sauerkraut deserves better than the reputation it has abroad. White cabbage, salted and left to ferment, keeps all winter and holds enough vitamin C that sailors carried barrels of it against scurvy. That is also where the nickname Krauts comes from, so we have earned that one fairly.
Rotkohl, red cabbage cooked down with apple and cloves, goes beside anything roasted. In the south the same vegetable is Blaukraut, blue cabbage, because the acid in the pot decides which color you get and the two halves of the country apparently cook it differently enough to disagree about what they are looking at.
The Cake Nobody Can Prove
Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, Black Forest cake, is the most famous thing we bake, and its origin story falls apart the moment you push on it. A confectioner named Josef Keller claimed he created it in 1915 at a café in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn and nowhere near the Black Forest. The problem is that the name turns up in a city ordinance from Brandenburg an der Havel published in February 1915, before Keller can have arrived there at all.
What is settled is the recipe. The food code requires Schwarzwälder Kirschwasser, cherry brandy from the region, in an amount you can clearly taste, and since 2014 the cake holds an EU registration as a traditional specialty. Legally defined, historically homeless.
For something simpler, ask for Rote Grütze: red berries barely cooked, served cold under cream or vanilla sauce. A northern thing, and better than the description suggests.
The jam doughnut is where our naming problem turns comic. In most of the country it is a Berliner. In Berlin it is a Pfannkuchen, which everywhere else means a pancake. In Bavaria it is a Krapfen. Order carefully.
What We Eat Now
The most popular fast food in the country is Turkish, and the version we eat was assembled here. In Turkey the grilled meat comes off the spit onto a plate; meat, salad, and sauce packed into flatbread to eat while walking is a German invention out of the guest-worker generation. Kadir Nurman usually gets the credit, selling them near Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo from 1972, and he was refreshingly straight about it: someone else may well have done the same thing in a quiet corner, he said, but the Döner became known through him. Others claim earlier dates, including a stand in Reutlingen in 1969, and nobody can prove any of it.
Beyond that, eating out in a German city looks like eating out in any European city: Italian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Syrian, Thai. Vegetarian cooking moved from the margins to the standard menu inside about fifteen years, and vegan options are now ordinary rather than a special request, which is a larger shift than it sounds given how attached we are to pork.
What goes in the glass alongside all of it belongs to German beer and German wine, and the pattern behind which region cooks what runs through the German regions themselves.
One piece of practical advice for your first evening. Ignore the printed menu and ask for the Tageskarte, the day’s card. It’s usually one or two dishes, and what the kitchen actually wanted to cook that morning—plus, it costs less. Then order a beer, because that part we’ve gotten right. ;-)