“Schroeder's Restaurant, Sturdy as a Three-Ton Boulder”

Schroeder's Restaurant, Sturdy as a Three-Ton Boulder

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It's not often enough that a waiter with a lilting Mitteleuropean accent greets SFoodie with the phrase, "We have a nice pig knuckle today." And who can resist a nice pig knuckle? Not us. Not even in the middle of a busy weekday.

According to its website, Schroeder's dates back to 1893, but has been under the ownership of Jana and Stefan Filipclk since 1997. The Filipclks bought into a restaurant so encrusted in tradition and memorabilia that to make radical changes might strip out the thing that has kept it going for a century. No fools they, it's all still there. The room has the dim, wood-walled feel of our elementary-school gym (which dated back to the same era). The walls and pillars are covered in steins, signs, and stags' heads ― there isn't a square foot of the space that doesn't announce Schroeder's German-ness.

​The place fills up during soccer games and monthly polka nights (Joe Smiell's band is playing this Friday, with a $7 cover, Bavarian Club dancers, and polka lessons). At lunch, though, tables of business people are scattered throughout the place, along with a pair of tech-khaki types in their 20s halfway through their liter steins of beer ― which must work out to be the alcoholic equivalent of a three-martini lunch. The servers make frequent, formal appearances. Sausage sandwiches stay in the $11 range, while entrees ascend from the $15 mark.

We spent a good 20 minutes gawking at the Herman Richter murals, which moved from the restaurant's third location when the business decamped up Front Street in 1959. The one across us depicted a Porky Pig-looking guy asking a horrified waitress for more food, even as he tucked into a table covered in meat. We felt like both glutton and server when the pig knuckle arrived. Preceded by a potato served on top of a potato cake (?), the knuckle was bigger than a newborn's head, and served on the very platter that Salome must have used to present John the Baptist's. The meat was surrounded by a quarter-cup of horseradish and massive piles of braised sauerkraut and spicy, sweetened red cabbage. (Our tablemate ordered the sauerbraten with gingersnap sauce, which was decent but not nearly as good as Walzwerk's.)

The knuckle was a dish that dates back to the era when an undressed haunch of meat was a welcome spectacle. Braised for hours, the meat slumped away from the bone as soon as we sliced through the skin and trembling fat that held the cut together. The fat kept the meat tender, too, and liberal applications of horseradish and sweet-tart cabbage kept us eating. Still, we couldn't finish more than a third of the hock, and the rest came away with us, intended for a pot of beans. Schroeder's for lunch? Probably not again. But for 100 years the restaurant has been a favorite spot for post-work brats and half-liters of wheat beer ― a tradition we'd be happy to continue.