German in Orlando

Fall is the season when millions of people converge on Munich for Oktoberfest, a two-week bacchanal of beer-drinking, bratwurst-eating and debauchery. But here in Orlando, you can catch the spirit year-round at Bauern-Stube.

It's an old German restaurant with new digs on South Orange Avenue. A former Pizza Hut has been transformed into a German farm-house atmosphere, where costumed waiters with thick accents bring you piles of authentic food and German beer on tap. On Friday and Saturday nights, the live entertainment includes accordion players and an acrobat act from Berlin.

This is the kind of food that has fortified generations of Germans against those bitter, cold winters: noodle casserole with Black Forest ham and Swiss cheese ($8.95) and East Prussian dumplings with horseradish gravy ($9.95). It's becoming more of a rarity even in places like Munich, where these days it's easier to find a good sushi bar than an old-style German restaurant, says co-owner Barbara Hutto, a native of Berlin.

In keeping with a typical German "gasthaus" that entertains travelers, Bauern-Stube is decorated with a dizzy display of knick-knacks, cuckoo clocks, stuffed birds, fir-tree garlands and Cabbage Patch frauleins. My friend thought it looked like a Christmas tree had exploded inside the restaurant. But the clutter adds a cozy touch that grows on you.

Potato pancakes ($4.95), fried and topped with applesauce and sour cream, take the edge off your appetite while you wait for dinner. These are much more than glorified hash browns – the shredded potatoes are bonded with eggs, nutmeg, oil and vinegar, and they're heavy and firm as burgers.

Wiener schnitzel ($10.75) was a juicy, fried cutlet of pork, seasoned with paprika, which gave it a tasty reddish cast inside. The dish was teamed with spaetzle, a cross between noodles and dumplings. Tossed with butter, they're delicious.

The moist and tender sauerbraten ($12.50) is a specialty here, featuring sliced roast beef with a deep, dark gravy of bay leaves and cloves. Even if you think you don't like sauerkraut, definitely give it a whirl at Bauern-Stube. Mild and mellow, fresh out of a pork broth stew, seasoned with juniper, it's nothing like the canned, excessively acidic variety.

Among the desserts, Black Forest cake ($3) was a still a little too icy inside, having just been thawed out of the freezer. Otherwise it was properly folded with chocolate and cherries, iced with whipped cream.

If you visit, heed the posted sign: "15% tip includet in bill!" (sic). Hutto instituted the policy because many of her German customers were not leaving tips, assuming it already was figured in – because that's the custom in Germany.

"Let the guests consider themselves as travelers about to reach a shared destination together," states one of famed epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's rules for dining. It wasn't until after we drove past a succession of Slovakian-tagged street signs – Jergo, Stefanik, Moyses, Kuzmany – then heartily feasted on a slew of Austro-Hungarian, Czech and German delights, that we fully grasped the essence of the gastronome's precept. Bohemian cuisine was somewhat foreign to us, and sharing its bold flavors in intrepid conviviality made reaching that figurative "shared destination" all the more enjoyable. In literal terms, that terminus was Chef Hans Café, a Winter Park hideaway serving deftly executed Eastern European comfort staples in a warm setting befitting an Old World matriarch.

Like weary vagabonds, we pored over the ample offerings on the menu; eager anticipation of their arrival provided plenty of time to down a pint of Golden Pheasant ($6.25), a smooth Slovakian lager that nicely complemented the restaurant's heavy fare. And I do mean heavy.

There are some weighty items on the bill of fare, and the scales of taste tipped in favor of the black forest schnitzel ($17.95), a gouda-cloaked pork cutlet breaded, fried and served atop a potato pancake a few notches above your average hash brown. It's a flavor-packed hungry man's meal, to be sure. Potato knodel ($6.95) is a little less substantial, but just as satisfying. Held together by a dollop of sour cream, the quartet of mashed-potato-textured dumplings came with enough sauerkraut bedding to give the dish a country peasant feel. I should mention that their fresh-baked bread (served with a cream-cheese butter seasoned with scallions and paprika) and complimentary cranberry-walnut salads were both signs of great things to come.

The sauce in both the Hungarian goulash ($15.95) and the chicken paprikash ($14.95) was heartily sublime. The burgundy wine-paprika gravy upstaged the goulash's beefy hunks of silken sirloin and pillowy spaetzle; if it's old-country comfort you crave, this is the dish for you. The paprikash is lent a luxurious thickness by the addition of sour cream, and when slathered over a succulent, nicely seasoned chicken breast makes a dish for all palates. Herbaceous rack of lamb's ($23.95) elegance was diminished by undercooking (which was remedied, however) and a side of mint jelly that tasted more like Wrigley's Spearmint Gum Jell-O.

Hearing "Lullaby and Goodnight" certainly didn't help our slumbrous state at the meal's conclusion, but we soon found ourselves awakened by the arrival of traditional apple strudel ($6.95), a light, flaky pastry and not the thick, dense version I was expecting. A side of creme anglaise was a nice, though not necessary, touch. I enjoyed every forkful of seven-layer cake ($6.95), a wonderful slab of alternating layers of sponge cake and chocolate buttercream punctured by shards of caramelized sugar. Visitors to the restaurant may recognize it as the erstwhile Chef Henry's Café, which also served Eastern European fare. The place has been sold to Stephanie Gadient, a Swiss native who renamed the restaurant after her father Hans.

"Tell me what you eat" said Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you who you are." After my meal at Chef Hans Cafe, I am sold.