I heartily agree-my (german) aunt made the world’s best Christmas cookies (flavored with kummel).
Alas, she is gone, and so is the recipe.
I honestly don’t know what you people are talking about – everywhere I go, all over town and everywhere around, it’s just one German restaurant after another. They’re all over the place! I can’t swing a cat without hitting at least one, so what on earth is everyone going on about –
Oh! Right! Wait! I live in Germany. Never mind. Also, I don’t swing cats.
But just try and find decent Mexican food around here …
But in all seriousness, I can see how stereotyped German food could have fallen out of favor, as more and lighter options have become available. Now, if you’re talking about real German food – the biggest dishes in spring are white asparagus and Frankfurter Grüne Soße, which are the food of the gods. The gods!
Forget the restaurants for a moment. Try to find an authentic bakery in the US! Man, I love the German breakfast rolls and the many desserts which just don’t taste the same here.
My WAG is that our ingredients are not the same, but I’ll let our German friends speak to that.
Thanks
Q
German food is not bland; if it were, it would be massively popular.
I guess it depends on how people are defining “bland,” then. Like I said, I like German food and have spent much time eating there, but compared with other more popular ethnic cuisines, it’s not difficult for me to see why people may characterize it as “bland.”
I don’t see how you can classify German cuisine as “bland” unless most standard American fare (burgers, steaks, mac-n-cheese) is also “bland”, as well as a good deal of Italian, Greek, non-Szechuan Chinese, and pretty much all the rest of European food as well. Let’s throw in Russian and Scandanavian for good measure. None of these regularly incorporate hot or heavy spices, but nobody’s running around saying “Let’s not get Greek tonight, it’s just too bland.”
Heck, when I think of German, I most often think of heavily acidic food. Sauerkraut, Sauerbraten, nice vinegary/fennel-y sausages, mustards, horseradish… not Indian or Thai level spice, but certainly enough flavor to hold its own when compared with your average classic American or European cuisine.
Yes, I would consider all those as “bland” comparatively. I have had people complain to me about the blandness of Italian food, too, when it’s not the heavily spiced versions you get in Southern Italy. The type of Italian food I like: simple, tomato sauces, maybe with a little bit of basil and just a touch of garlic or onion (not overloaded with the stuff), is often characterized as “bland.”
I mean, honestly, the characterization of German food as bland is not exactly out-of-thin air. Here’s an expat site with a slew of English speakers bitching about how bland the food there is. The first complaints are about the spice (heat) levels, but it goes on from there.
Let me emphasize that I find well prepared German food (and, yes, I know “German” covers a hell of a lot of ground) to be delicious. I don’t think it is “bland” in terms of being under seasoned. It’s seasoned perfectly well for the dish. As I said above, everything you eat doesn’t need to be exploding with a million different herbs and/or spices–sometimes you just want the pure simplicity of the food to shine through. But, colloquially, it is not uncommon to conflate a lack of a heat level or aggressive spicing with “blandness.” I’ve heard many foreigners bitch about “American food” being “bland” almost as often as I’ve heard Americans complain about Central and Eastern European fare being bland.
There used to be at least a dozen German restaurants around here when I was young, and now there’s two or three. 
There were a lot more Germans actually living in the city back then. I suppose as they aged and died, their kids moved out to the suburbs and didn’t want to keep up their parents restaurants in the city? And it appears the Germans living on the old North side have been replaced by other ethnic groups.
There’s really very little German immigration to this country today, so there’s no one to carry on the tradition. One reason is that, like most of Europe, Germany long ago ceased to be a poor and economically depressed place that people were terribly eager to leave. And although most of Europe isn’t doing nearly as well as Germany, it hardly seems now like a place that people would be desperate to get out of, as might have been the case a few generations ago when American kids were admonished to “clean their plates”[sup]1[/sup] because of the starving kids in Europe. Notwithstanding that, there still seem to be quite a few young immigrants from the British Isles, France[sup]2[/sup], and Italy…enough people to keep the number of restaurants of their respective specialties staffed.
[sup]1[/sup]Or “eat their plates”, thereby inspiring some memorable cartoon humor.\
[sup]2[/sup]I was surprised to learn that St. Sebastian’s RC Church, serving an ordinary West L.A. parish with few visible signs of French or Italian culture, offers Mass in both those languages.
The one near me was so heavy it sank.
No, I’m not from Cincinnati, but have only heard second-hand. I can inquire further with a friend down there, if you like.
I think we just have two different definitions of bland, then. Bland, to me, is something without much taste or texture at all; a nicely cooked steak with absolutely no seasonings would not qualify, for example, as the meat itself has texture and flavor. Sure, it’d be better with a bit of salt, but it’s not bland on its own.
Simple tomato sauces as you describe are anything but bland IMO.
Come to Milwaukee!
Mader’s Restaurant
Karl Ratzsch
Old German Beer hall
Kegel’s Inn
Bavarian Inn
House of Hamburg
Weissgerber’s Bier Stube
Von Rothenburg
Schwefel’s Restaurant
In 2000 I worked for a German company in Darmstadt and I was amazed at how many Italian restaurants there were! Figured it was because they both had a ‘thing’ going on, back in the day.
I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here. I agree that they’re not bland (although that’s a description I don’t use myself because of its imprecision), but they are described as such by many, many people, so the description is hardly perplexing. I don’t find Polish or Russian food (the cuisines I grew up with; well, the former mostly) to be bland at all, either, yet they are almost invariably described as such. So, when using a word usage barometer that puts Polish and Russian on the “bland” side of the scale, with Thai, Indian, and Mexican on the “non bland” side, it’s no mystery to me why German is characterized as “bland” by many people.
ETA: And, yes, I believe for many people, steaks on their own are bland. (And, to be clear, I strongly disagree). Why else the popularity of all the marinades and sauces? A good piece of meat doesn’t need that crap, yet many (well, “most” if not “all” by the cookouts I’ve been to) feel compelled to add more flavors to the meat as, on its own, they feel it’s bland.
I was going to say, I know a lot of people who think that steak on its own is quite bland, and have to drown it in some sauce or another to eat it.
I think I’m getting what you’re saying - I know that you personally aren’t describing German food as bland, and I agree with you that German food has a stereotype of being bland. What you and I differ on is that I don’t get why German food has this stereotype while many other foods of equal levels on the bland scale don’t. Why has the world at large decided that German cuisine = bland but (for example) Greek cuisine isn’t?
Yeah, German food is bland and heavy. This also explains the near complete absence of Irish Pubs in Boston as well.
French restaurants are also in decline around here, but a Google search turned up a handful.
Kansas City’s best German restaurant closed a few years back because they rented out their back room for a party, that turned out to the the Nazi Party.