Hofgarten

A fun joint , full of happy middle-aged beer-drinking Germans (and on a tuesday night!). If you have never been to a real German beer garden, and just imagined it in your head, the Hofgarten is pretty much the exact depiction of what's in your head.

My German friends strongarmed me into trying this place. I teetotal , so the beer and schnapps offered are wasted on me , but I was hungry.

Apparently this is "palatinate " food - a region in Germany . The host came by the table - an affable , if eccentric fellow. He seemed pleased that folks from Texas had found his little pub.

They don't serve fancy food here - no sauerbraten or schnitzel. It is almost all salads, sausage, and hunks o' meat . My friends demanded i order a dish with the ominous name of "sow's stomach" but they assured me it was not actual stomach. They told me it was a rarity - hard to find outside the fabled Palatinate.

I ordered the day's special - a. "Sow's stomach" cooked with chestnuts. The dish proved to be a thick round slice of assorted pig bits, somehow welded together into a sort of giant sausage. Unfortunately, the chestnuts, baked right into the pig bits, were bland and not particularly tasty. They didn't lend a "chestnutty" flavor to the meat either. If i get this next time, it's sans nuts. It came with a heap of excellent rotkraut and another heap of excellent sauerkraut.

I give it 4 stars anyway because my wife loved her salad, and they gave me no flak about my peculiar drink order. They even refilled it (though i suspect they charged full price for the refill, as is normal in Europe).

It wasn't my favorite place jn Germany but surely worth a visit. Even more so if you like beer (unlike me ).