More Or Less Oktoberfest

[title type="h6"]Wednesday, October 2, 2013.[/title] German culinary traditions have never disappeared from New Orleans, but you'd never know that to look through a directory of restaurants. In the metro area is only one German eatery--Jager Haus, in the French Quarter. The next nearest is Taste of Bavaria, a long way off in Springfield. And that's about it. This is not unique to New Orleans, but a phenomenon found across America. Unless the community is overwhelmingly Germanic, German restaurants are few and far between. I guess they'd be there if the dining public wanted them. But I don't think they do. Except at this time of year. I am getting lots of requests for info about Oktoberfest. And I have much to tell them. We have a half-dozen restaurants offering something Teutonic, from the one-shot event at Luke to the full month of gemutlichkeit at the Peppermill. The Peppermill? What's German about the Riccobono family? I don't know, but for as far back as I can remember, the Metairie restaurant mounted a special menu of German food every year. On my way home, my first inclination was to skip dinner entirely. But I was a little too peckish for that. The Peppermill is my restaurant of last resort before I hit the Causeway. I went there without thinking about the Oktoberfest menu, but once there I was happy to be. We have here a variety of schnitzels, including a couple of favorites of mine: jager schnitzel (with mushrooms) and Holsteiner schnitzel (with a fried egg on top of the panneed veal). And sauerbraten, and a couple of other things. [caption id="attachment_39669" align="alignnone" width="480"] Jager Schnitzel at Peppermill.[/caption] I ordered the jager schnitzel. It started with panneed red veal. The Peppermill has long given customers a choice between baby white veal and calf, the latter being darker, less expensive, and uninvolved with that scandal about veal from twenty years ago. The sauce was a brown gravy with mushrooms. Just one kind, making me recall Chef Willy Coln's best Oktoberfest dish, made with sauteed veal and five different kinds of wild mushrooms. A pile of sauerkraut was on the right side of the veal now before me, and some sliced, boiled potato discs were on the left. To be honest, none of this was outstanding. The sauerkraut was way overcooked, and the potatoes were underdone to the point of being crisp. The veal was good enough, but the sauce was uninteresting. German food, as I know very well, is not the specialty of this restaurant. But I must cover my beat. And I wasn't hungry enough for the oysters Riccobono. That leaves me wondering only one thing. With a one-third-full dining room, in which they could have given me any number of bigger tables more in the middle of things, why did they stick me at a deuce in a dark corner? Mary Ann's longest drive was today. She has to cover 625 miles from Fort Worth to Albuquerque. En route, she texted me (I told her not to do that anymore, but why should today be any different?) with the messages "I love Texas!" and "Is that little drugstore with the soda fountain in Jacksboro?" Indeed it is. We stopped there on a trip that way in 1997, when the kids were little. The store had one of those old scales that not only allowed you to weigh yourself, but would give you the answer to your choice of life's big questions. She climbed aboard, found a pertinent question, and I dropped the nickel into the slot. I don't know what her question was, because I was looking not at the fortune but at the weight the scale showed. I announced it with a mock-incredulous, loud voice. (It was not the number shown on this photograph, or anything close to it, I'd better say.) Good thing nobody else was in the store, or else she would have knocked me out cold. We had burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, fries and cherry Cokes at the soda fountain. Fun. The kids had never seen such a thing. To me and MA, these institutions were essential at one time, but disappeared seemingly overnight. It can happen to anything, I guess. By the time I left the Peppermill, MA was pulling into Albuquerque, with the sun just having gone down. She was discouraged by the trip so far, but I gave her my best advice: after you drive 600 miles two days in a row, the whole world can't help but seem a miserable place. She'll be better after a good night's sleep. [title type="h4"]Peppermill. Metairie: 3524 Severn Ave. 504-455-2266.[/title]