D.C.-area food critics have often lamented the dearth of German restaurants, and normally, we, too, would join in with complaints, as we are fond of the hearty meat-and-potatoes peasant food and earthy beers the Germans do so well. But since dining recently at Capitol Hill’s Café Berlin, we will forever bite our tongues; our meal here took us right back to the beer halls we have visited abroad.

The menu offered all of the requisite German staples: sauerbraten, goulash, wiener schnitzel, Jaeger schnitzel, and, of course, a wurst platter. We took on the sauerbraten and the goulash as the dishes that would best satisfy our meat and starch cravings.

The meat used for sauerbraten was a bit tough, which made the substantial potato dumpling accompanying it a necessarily pliant foil. Too often, the sauce used in sauerbraten tends to err on the sweet side, but Café Berlin's version had just the right amount of sweetness without being too cloying. And the potato dumpling served as an excellent vehicle for sopping up leftover sauce. Of course, when the supply of dumpling was exhausted, the crusty loaf of bread served our needs just fine.

We started out with an order of potato pancakes, which arrived in a manageable medium size and virtually grease-free. A very crispy outside, slightly charred in some places, yielded a creamy cooked-through inside. We piled generous amounts of applesauce and sour cream and triumphantly declared them the best in the universe.

As for the meat, the goulash was among the more exemplary renditions of our favorite peasant food dish with its hearty cubes of meat, smothered in a thick, rich brown sauce. This was lovingly served over an ample mound of buttery spätzle, the thick homemade pasta, which is among the most glorious of all starches, in our opinion. Usually, spätzle is an afterthought, something restaurants just throw together and offer in small quantities, but not at Café Berlin. The little handmade nuggets were soft and creamy, and mixed with the meat and sauce like a European version of chili mac. Both dishes came with a separate dish of stewed vinegary red cabbage, which was the perfect respite from all the carnage, salt, and starch we were shoveling down our gullets.

This is precisely one of those meals that requires a beer the size of a totem pole, so we all ordered Hefeweizens in towering half-liter wheat-beer glasses. The refreshing notes of citrus amidst the wheatiness tempered those salty dishes just right.

All of this decadence wouldn’t be complete without sampling the desserts, which were so gratuitously displayed in the adjoining room throughout dinner. Anyone visiting the restrooms passes by them. The clever placement worked, as we decided right when the plates were cleared to sample the sweets.

When diners are ready to order, the waiters bring over a tray with one of each selection. On this evening we choose to taste four desserts among the eight or so choices of tarts and cakes. We sampled the ultra-dense poppy seed cake, which had a grainy texture, but was still soft, moist, and only a touch sweet. The pear-almond tart was a fresh, nutty, creamy delight, and it was a nice companion to the blackberry tart, which showcased the true nature of the tart blackberries. We also enjoyed a taste of the Black Forest cake, which came to us in an enormous wedge and was moist and chocolatey and well soaked with rum.

Café Berlin
322 Massachusetts Avenue NE
(202) 543-7656

Photo by Flickr user Il Primo Uomo and used under a Creative Commons license.