Sidetrack:
Why are there no good Chinese restaurants in Portland, OR? We have a sizable Chinese population and interest in Chinese culture. I couldn’t get into the New Year’s festival at the convention center this year—it was filled to fire marshal capacity! We even have Dragon Boat race teams! So why is the food so much lousier than anything on the East Coast?
I don’t think there are a lot of German restaurants anywhere. Other than various beers, krauts, wursts and sausages, what are they known for?
My friend and I were in Hamburg a few years ago and we asked around for some good German restuarants. People laughed at us - “German restaurants?!! Zer are no German restaurants here!!”
Sorry. How stupid of me.
Apply pie, at least, it not in the least German. It originates from a british recipe at least 700 years (and probably much more. Hollanders adopted it somewhat more recently, having 500 year old records of it. It’s not a German-style desert, although they’ve adopted similar treats.
Likewise, there are English and German sncestors of hamburgers and hot dogs; the english versions are simply usually enclosed in breading rather than being partly enclosed (burgers) or open-face (the dogs).
We don’t get out much.
It occurred to me this morning that, in a way, A&W is to German cuisine what Taco Bell is to Mexican.
In that root beer is a concoction of herbs, barks, and similar inedibles and nobody loves disgusting herbal crap like Germans, you might have something. However, none of the herbal crap is usually used to stimulate ones bowels, so that’s a strike against it being German.
The Coney Island, A&W’s signature foodstuff, well, one doesn’t normally associate chili with Germans, but it’s associated with Texas and Cincinnati, both places with large German populations. And a Coney Island will go right through ya, so it has that in common with German food.
I got to spend three months in Germany a few years ago, and had some great food; pork shoulder, roast meats, one place near the train station had a dish that was sort of a meat sampler. I told some of the people I worked with how much I liked the German food and they said it was Franconian. I went to a German restaurant in Chicago and the food was nothing like what I’d had in Nuremberg.
But the reverse was just as true. My adventures trying to find American food in Germany were fascinating. I had a hamburger with a slice of cucumber, not pickle, on it. And the other American restaurant in town was the only place I could find that had turkey (it was Thanksgiving), but it was in tomato sauce over rice.
Wiener Schnitzel, by the way, is Austrian, and I think the recipe goes back to when it was Austria-Hungary.
I’ll be in Sacramento in a few weeks, maybe I should try one of the hof brau hauses.
Is Chang’s still there? Mongolian, not strictly Chinese, but I used to like that place.
What those guys said about a lot of traditional American food coming from German food. A lot of Texas barbecue comes from central Texas German immigrant cooks and butchers, like brisket and German sausage.
German Barbecue: Lift a Beer to the Inventors of Texas Barbecue
I had German cuisine in a restaurant in Heidelberg last year. It was perhaps my best ever restaurant experience. The food was delicious, the beer more so. There’s plenty of Polish and other cuisine here but not much specifically German. 
Stupid European Union isn’t working properly lol.
Whoa, now. Let’s not get carried away! 
We have our Native American friends to thank for pit barbecue. (Though I don’t doubt the Germans in Texas may have put their own spin on it.)
Just a note- I asked Mom & we agree, we would be totally on board with a pumpernickel-crust pizza!
Personally, old-style traditional German food has the reputation of being fat, low on veggies and unhealthy, while the Mediterreanan Diet= Italian style has lots of veggies and less fat & meat and is far more healthier (similar for sushi, which have also become trendy in the last 10 years; before, they were yuck or unknown). Esp. in Bavaria, close to the South anyway, that’s why Pizza and Pasta are becoming more popular.
And any immigrant can do a pizza in Call-a-pizza place; but to cook a real meal properly in a small Gaststätte so that it tastes good and not mushy requires skill and training, and the restaurant industry suffers from shortages of skilled people because nobody wants to work deep into the night and on weekends and holidays all the time.
The explosion of interest in Japanese food in the U.S., starting about 30 years ago, has a complex and very interesting history. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who’s interested.
I lived in Germany for 3.5 years. I LOVED German food over there. The reason German food hasn’t caught on in the US? It STINKS in the US. Yes, I’ve been to Schmidt’s (mentioned earlier). I live 10 minutes from it. It stinks. Compared to real, authentic German food from a nice German restaurant, it’s absolutely terrible. Sorry.
I have yet to find a place in the US that compares to even an average German restaurant in Germany.
Oh, for a properly prepared Pfeffersteak or Jägerschnitzel. 
During WWII, according to my grandmother, people started calling it “the Continental method.” But she insists that before that, it was German style.
I don’t know all countries that use it but at least France, a sizeable chunk of the continent, doesn’t. There it’s called the German method, too.
Could you recommend some places? I only know of the Heidelberg Deli in Arlington and the Kaffee Klatch in Front Royal.
Reputation-wise Scandinavian food tends to run neck and neck with Scottish food as being considered among the world’s worst cuisines. I don’t see that there’s any compelling demand to have restaurants devoted to the stuff.
One word…Sauerkraut. horrible ,stinky waste of cabbage.
Pistols at dawn! Sauerkraut is the most wondrous awesomeness ever.