There's something refreshingly adult about the menu at Stammtisch, Northeast Portland's four-month-old German restaurant. Here, you can spoon up pungent, pillow-soft leberknödel -- liver meatballs -- from a shallow pool of beef broth the color of malted barley. You can fork through maultaschen, the wallet-sized ravioli dressed in butter and white wine. Or you can nibble on rosy, riesling-braised trout draped across summer squash and cherry tomatoes.
This is a far cry from most German restaurants in America, where the most prevalent dishes -- buttered noodles, bread and melted cheese, sausages with ketchup and fries -- have a whiff of the kid's menu.
Stammtisch, literally "regular's table," goes beyond pre-teen pleasures. The restaurant, a sister to North Portland's popular Prost, digs beneath the surface with dishes like that leberknödelsuppe, executing most of the classics with confidence and skill. And that's all while serving liters and two-liter, boot-shaped glasses of tremendous German beer. You'd be hard pressed to find many other restaurants cooking German food this considered outside of Germany itself.
Stammtisch opened in May, with beer and food menus instantly superseding Prost's. At the North Portland bar, a tiny kitchen turns out decent pretzels, cold-cut boards and OK sausage. Fans learned early on to stick mostly to the beer.
Stammtisch
At Stammtisch, Hart hired Graham Chaney, a former sous chef at St. Jack, The Oregonian's 2011 Rising Star Restaurant, to craft a full, traditional menu. It was a good move. Like St. Jack, Aaron Barnett's Lyon-style bouchon, the food at Stammtisch is good, hip and a bit gluttonous, with an overarching fondness for butter, wine and subtle celebrations of excess.
Stammtisch
Rating:
2 stars
Cuisine and scene:
German comfort food and beer in a lively, modestly sized Northeast Portland beer hall.
Recommended:
Leberknödel, maultaschen, currywurst, wienerschnitzel, apple strudel, beer.
Vegetarian friendly?
Kartoffelpuffer (crisp potato cakes with thin apple sauce), salads, those maultaschen, desserts.
Sound level:
More
, less polka.
Beverages:
A stellar 18-tap German beer list, wine, German-accented cocktails, schnapps, soft drinks, coffee, tea.
Price range:
Klein (small plates), $4-$6; mittel (medium), $7-$12; grosse (large plates), $11-$17; desserts, $5-$8.
Extras:
No reservations, major credit cards, on-street parking, handicapped access.
Serving:
Dinner and late-night daily; kids welcome 3 to 10 p.m. daily.
Details:
401 N.E. 28th Ave., 503-206-7983,
You might take the measure of Stammtisch by sitting at the brick-and-wood bar and ordering those maultaschen, a Swabian cousin to ravioli, usually stuffed with meat, here packed with soft cheese and leeks, slicked with butter, browned and scattered with green bean sections and chopped oyster mushrooms. Or you could slurp that leberknödelsuppe before digging into the crunchy, golden weinerschnitzel, a flap of breaded and fried pork coated in mushroom gravy and laid across good spaetzle, each savory bite best cut with tart red cabbage. The kitchen does nice things with rabbit, both braised and rolled into a roulade.
Perhaps the best sign that you're in a good German restaurant, more than the Bavarian flag banner draped over the brick building's facade, more than the 18 taps of German beer, is the presence, on the everyday menu, of schweinshaxen, that most indecent and lusted-after of Bavarian specialties. Like most, my first experience with schweinshaxen was memorable. It was December, and snowing, and I had just landed in Berlin as a backpack-strapped teenager. I wandered through the bureaucratic architecture of the city's east until I stumbled, randomly on a homey Bavarian restaurant. I sat down and asked for the most German thing on the menu.
They suggested haxe, literally ham hock, the upper part of a pig's leg. What arrived was a quivering mess of fat and flesh slow-roasted to a deep red-brown, encircled by the largest, crunchiest crackling I've ever seen. Two bones stuck out of the meat like a disgusting replay from some freak football accident. Stammtisch has schweinshaxen, though their version reminded me more of a big hunk of pulled pork, with red-streaked meat that falls off the central bone. Leftovers, if you have any, would go great in a sandwich, though I missed the crisp skin and general obscenity of the dish as I've had it elsewhere.
haxe.jpg
Many Stammtisch regulars will focus their calories on the beer list, perhaps aided by a pretzel with mustard and gooey, paprika-dusted camembert. For them, I might suggest the addition of the ubiquitous Berliner street snack currywurst, here a juicy sausage, with fries and mildly spiced ketchup, served in a hot dog tray. You won't regret it.
Star rating
The Oregonian uses a star system for its restaurant reviews, with ratings ranging from zero to four stars, reflecting the critic's opinion of the restaurant's food, service and ambience, weighted toward the food.
One of my favorite, albeit least healthy, recent Portland food trend involves the rising fat content in the city's sausages, a move sparked, I suspect, by Olympic Provisions sensational bratwurst. That continues at Stammtisch, where the trio of house sausages are wonderfully juicy. Each bratwurst, knackwurst and weisswurst comes seared, either solo or in a stack over a bed of simple sauerkraut, which is nice if, like me, you've ever been suspicious of boiled weisswurst served traditionally in lukewarm water.
Stammtisch pushes Portland's already strong German beer scene forward in a big way, with solid bets like Kostritzer Schwarzbier, Hofbrau Lager and Veltins Pilsner alongside some less available offerings. Among those, my favorites were an ultra-refreshing Zunft Kölsch, the unfiltered Grevensteiner lager and the Professor Fritz Briem Grut, an unusual beer brewed with herbs and spices in a style that disappeared after the passing of the Reinheitsgebot, the German Beer Purity Law.
Service is friendly and organized, though this is a beer hall -- you will have to ask for water, and maybe silverware. Pro-tip: Stammtisch uses proper glassware and a two-stage pouring process for each of its beers. If you're in a rush for a drink, consider one of the six house cocktails, each made with some German-accented spirit (ala the Manhattan made with pear schnapps). These will come out in a flash.
Stick around for dessert, a warm apple strudel with flaky pastry, a slice of black forest cake or three scoops of super-minty ice cream. Or finish your meal with one of a dozen schnapps, in flavors from apple to raspberry to honey to peppermint. Like its sister bar, Stammtisch offers plenty of reasons to say "cheers."
-- Michael Russell