Columbus, Ohio – In my endless search for weird restaurants, the one thing always missing is an ethnic neighborhood. An El Salvadoran restaurant in New York was on the Upper East Side. An Iranian restaurant in Paris was in the Latin Quarter. An African restaurant in Orlando was in – gasp! – Disney World.
That’s why I so looked forward to covering the recent Texas-Ohio State football game. In Ohio’s capital, in the middle of the Rust Belt, is a neighborhood that seemed deeply ethnic, with roots dating back to another century, to a time when food and family were intertwined like a strong handshake.
German Village.
OK, it’s not exactly Chinatown in San Francisco or the Arab Quarter in Jerusalem. Everyone in the neighborhood looks as if they would have fit into my family photograph, but it had the trappings of what I remembered a Bavarian village to be.
German Village, about a 1.5- mile-by-nine-square-block area across two bridges from downtown Columbus, features redbrick roads worn down by horse and wagon traffic from the 19th and 20th centuries. High-steepled brick houses were everywhere. It also features a German restaurant with a name that makes it sound airlifted from Munich: Schmidt’s Sausage Haus.
It’s a two-story brick building with the Schmidt family crest over the sign. German and U.S. flags hang over the door behind two huge sweetgum trees. The only thing missing were guys in lederhosen playing accordions.
That I found when I walked in.
Schmidt’s has been around since 1886, shortly after J. Fred Schmidt came over from the Rhein River town of Montebourg and settled in the neighborhood populated by Germans attracted to Columbus for work in its many breweries. Much to my surprise, Schmidt’s is the only German restaurant left in German Village.
German Village Coffee House? Nope. Merely named for the neighborhood. Serves a nice café latte, though.
Schmidt’s is the lone German landmark of a neighborhood that fell into decline during anti-German sentiment in the 1930s. In 1965, some neighborhood folks used private funds to restore the area and started the German Village Society. Today it is populated by yuppies carrying briefcases across the bridge to downtown high rises, not Germans tending to sheep.
German Village has become to Columbus what Georgetown is to Washington.
“I’d like to say it’s German and they sing German songs on their porch, but it’s not true,” said Geoff Schmidt, 55, J. Fred’s great-great grandson who now runs Schmidt’s. “You see ethnic neighborhoods go downhill. This one went uphill.”
They do, however, sing German songs in Schmidt’s. You hear them and the creaking twang of the accordion as soon as you walk in. But you ignore the din when you’re immediately hit by a display case of the most luscious German desserts: German chocolate cake, giant cream pies and cream puffs the size of catcher’s mitts.
Behind the counter was a small bar where men swung huge steins of dark German beer. This is no place for weight watchers. Actually, German food isn’t all that fattening, although I did see many customers that night who could play on Ohio State’s offensive line. Go to Germany and you’ll see men are tall and husky but not often fat, and the curvy women have big shoulders (that’s a compliment, Helga) yet their diet is nearly void of fruits and vegetables.
My meal, after a 25-minute wait for a table, looked heavy but wasn’t. I considered trying the Bahama Mama, Schmidt’s signature dish consisting of hickory-smoked sausage, spiced and stuffed in “old world natural casing links” and rated as one of the city’s 10 best entrees by Columbus Monthly.
Instead, I ordered my favorite German dish, the most traditional wiener schnitzel, a lean veal cutlet and lightly breaded with a mushroom burgundy-based gravy made from ginger snaps shipped from Germany. Despite an initial appearance of a country-fried steak in a bad Southern diner, the wiener schnitzel was surprisingly light and absolutely delicious.
“It’s a lighter breading,” Schmidt said. “It’s definitely a better piece of meat than a lot of places. If you’re going to take it and pound the meat, you’ll buy inferior meat. We use a lean product to begin with.”
It came with a terrific, fresh sauerkraut and thin, silver-dollar-sized potato pancakes, two of 12 side dishes available. The thick slice of chocolate cream pie was the perfect finish to a meal I described to the waiter as “fantastic.”
“Danke schoen,” he said in worse German than mine. Like German Village, the waiter wasn’t really German. Fortunately, the one German trait that has stuck around for 119 years is food.
John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
