LEO/LHB Eats: Ein Feste Burg/Beer'n'brats in Schnitzelburg

[Robin Garr]

<table border="0" align="left" width="310"><tr><td><img src="http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/checks07.jpg" border="1" align="right"></td></tr><tr><td>Check's Café, an archetypal Germantown tavern, excels at the four Bs: brats, burgers, bean soup and beer. A recent renovation has freshened the interior without taking away any of the character. LEO Photo by Nicole Pullen.</td></tr></table>LEO's Eats with Louisville HotBytes
Ein Feste Burg - Beer and brats in Schnitzelburg
(With Guest Writer Greg Gapsis: Check's Café, Flabby's Schnitzelburg, Germantown Café)

Have a beer. And a bratwurst. And how about a little sauerkraut? Have yourself a happy little German something, and know that you're partaking of a heritage that runs long and deep in Louisville.

Our city has boasted a distinct German accent for nearly 200 years, since the first German-Americans (including the first arrivals in the Garr family) came down the Ohio from German-speaking enclaves in Philadelphia and Northern Virginia in the early 1800s.

Another boatload, literally - democratic German reformers fleeing the Habsburg Empire and dubbed "The Forty Eighters" - came along in 1849. Eerily foreshadowing the Hurstbournes and Polo Fields of the 20th century, they threw up rows of "shotgun" houses on fields that had been dairy farmland at the edge of the city south of Broadway and Beargrass Creek.

For a century, the loosely defined neighborhood was casually known as Germantown, or "Schnitzelburg" for yuks. In the 1970s, when the city established more specific neighborhood boundaries to take advantage of federal community-development bucks, Germantown and Schnitzelburg gained precise identities, approximately (and more than coincidentally) associated with the St. Therese and St. Elizabeth Catholic parishes, respectively.

If you know how to pronounce the old Oertel's beer ("Ehr-telz") and aren't befuddled by the name of Oechsli Avenue ("Ex-ley"), then you've got at least a touch of Louisville German heritage. And if you like beer and brats, then nothing more need be said.

Writer GREG GAPSIS has been out in Schnitzelburg on dining detail and brings us back this report on three food-and-drink landmarks, Check's Café, Flabby's and Germantown Café.

Full reports in LEO and on LouisvilleHotBytes.

BTW, "Schnitzelburg" was more than just a lame attempt at levity. The original area was home to furniture factories. Employers built the first shotgun houses for their workforce, who were German craftsmen. The German word for wood shaving is schnitzel, so that was one association.

Also, the area inside the old Portland and Shelby trolley line was referred to as "Schnitzelburg" while the surrounding area was "Germantown". anyway you cut it though, there's plenty of beer and brats to go around for everyone.

Ever since I moved back here I've been trying to remember the name of the dive (in the best possible sense) where we used to hang out after shows when I was at UofL. One look at the picture and I knew it was Check's. I remember lining up 40 cent gin and tonics and stuffing myself on brats.
Thanks for the memories.

Louisville is firmly positioned inside of the German triangle that is made up by Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. There was a huge migration of Germans to this part of the county in the second half of the 1800's. The two world wars caused a lot of sanitizing of German heritage, but it is easily the largest ethnic group in most folks' family tree around these parts.

[Robin Garr]

Louisville is firmly positioned inside of the German triangle that is made up by Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. There was a huge migration of Germans to this part of the county in the second half of the 1800's. The two world wars caused a lot of sanitizing of German heritage, but it is easily the largest ethnic group in most folks' family tree around these parts.

All true, and it explains our architecture and streetscape (and, at the risk of resurrecting a very old forum debate, it helps explain why we're not "Southern" in the same was as Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis and Birmingham are Southern.)

A couple of other nuances: As I understand it, Louisville and Cincinnati, to a greater extent than even St. Louis or Milwaukee, had a substantial amount of German immigration <i>before</i> the late 1840s, with land migration from established German communities in Philadelphia and Northern Virginia as early as the first decade of the 1800s. So when the "Forty Eighters" - the German Catholic refugees around the middle of the century who built Schnitzelburg - came over, they naturally found their way to Louisville because it already had a long-established German-American community.

The wood-factory "schnitzel=shaving" story posted in this thread is a new one to me, though. I'm not saying it's not so, but it's not widely reported, and I think the schnitzel as popular German food item explanation makes more intuitive sense.