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| There it is - pork cutlets with onions and potato salad! |
When you’ve been teaching for years, it can
get pretty stale if you just take the textbook, teach the students the words in
the book like “good, better, the best” and then have them go through the
exercises at the end of the unit. I was
looking for a creative way to teach a lesson on comparisons to my students so I
wouldn’t end up like a desperately bored zombie about to pull out my hair, just
to find a little excitement. I needed a context to put these words into, something
fresh, or it would first get stale, and then really old and moldy, like a loaf
of bread stuffed into the back of the breadbox and forgotten. Bread when fresh, is delicious. Teaching, when it’s fresh, is exciting.
While pondering this, I remembered a tool
that helps me find the best restaurants in whatever city I’m currently in – the
computer. Even though I live in Cologne,
I hadn’t used the computer much to search out good restaurants, instead relying
on recommendations from friends or the same books all the German bookstores
have. It never occurred to me to treat
Cologne as though I were a non-German speaking tourist. This time I went to the web and hit pay dirt –
I found a short, to-the-point article in English about the six best restaurants
in Cologne. Perfect. I made photocopies and brought them to
class.
My students peered at the page and began
talking about the restaurants listed even before anyone had started
reading. Number one on the list was a
place called “Lommerzheim,” a name I didn’t recognize, but my students
certainly did. “This is a fantastic restaurant,” Günter enthused. “You used to have to sit on telephone books on
top of empty beer kegs if you wanted to sit down.” He added, “Now you get to sit on chairs at
the tables.” He looked disappointed.
Sylvia added, “And the walls are a graying
yellow, with a one-centimeter coat of old tobacco smoke.” Thank God restaurants in Germany are now
smoke-free.
Steffie piped in, “You can get the longest
bratwurst in the world there - two-meters long.”
“Do you know the story about Bill Clinton?”
asked Günter. “When he was in Cologne a
few years ago, he wanted to eat at a Cologne brewery. His aide called the restaurant and said, ‘I’m
calling for President Clinton, who is with me.’
‘If that’s President Clinton, then I’m the Emperor of China,’ answered
Lommi.”
“Did the President get to eat there?” I
asked.
“No, Lommi wouldn’t let him come. If Clinton came, his normal clientele
wouldn’t have been able to eat there. He
chose to be loyal to his customers, so Clinton had to eat at another brewery.”
“Do you know Herr Lommerzheim?” I asked.
“Not anymore. He’s dead.
Since he’s gone, the restaurant just isn’t the same. It’s gotten more gentrified. Nowadays, there are chairs for the people to
sit on.” His nose curled in disapproval.
This didn’t sound bad to me.
“Is the food still good?”
“Ah, the food!” Peter smiled, his eyes glinting as he looked
toward the ceiling, his head shaking slowly as he labored to find adequate
words in English to express his feelings for this restaurant. “They have the thickest pork chops in the
world - four-centimeters thick.” That
would be two inches. Very thick. “And the cheapest price anywhere – only a few
euros.” He was doing very well with his
superlatives.
My son was leaving for Korea the following
day to study business, for who knows how long.
Maybe a night out for dinner would be a good idea.
“What about the beer?”
“They serve Päffgen.”
In Cologne, that statement needs no further
comment. Most Kölner consider Päffgen the best beer going. It is also my son’s favorite brand of Kölsch.
Other brands of Kölsch are
served all over the city in various restaurants, but not Päffgen. You can only buy Päffgen in the brewery itself
on the Ring in Cologne – and at Lommerzheim.
“Can I reserve a table?”
“Ah, that will be difficult. I don’t think so. People start lining up outside the restaurant
at 4:30 pm, when they open for dinner, and within an hour all the tables are
taken.”
I taught the same lesson to the next
class. After only one lesson, the topic
was still fresh, and I was curious to see if these students felt the same about
this restaurant.
“I go there once or twice a week in the
summer,” said one of the students. Then the
students started debating whether “Lommi’s” or Früh, a famous brewery near the
cathedral, was better.
“Lommi’s has a beer garden,” said
Torsten. “Früh doesn’t.”
“It does too,” protested Sebastian. “You can sit outside.”
“Ah, but it’s not a beer garden.”
I was beginning to feel a conviction in my
tummy that this might be a good place to spend our last evening before Jon’s departure
– if we could get a table.
I went home and phoned the restaurant, but
only got an answering machine, instructing me to leave my name and number, and
someone would call me back. I left my
name and number, telling the machine that I wanted a table for three at 7:30
pm. We waited for a call-back. And waited.
By 7:00 there still was no returned call, so we decided to simply go
there and try our luck.
“Hey – this restaurant is on our side of
the Rhine!” I announced to Jon as I checked the address. It is very difficult to find anything
interesting on the right side, so we usually have to endure long tram rides
onto the other side of the Rhine when we go out to eat.
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| Lommerzheim Brew Restauratn - with the tiniest sign in red, on the left |
After a short tram ride, we got off near
the Deutz train station and started walking, Jon using his cell phone as a
navigation device. Lommerzheim was on no
main thoroughfare, but we eventually found it, in the middle of a short, narrow
street. It was about as old as Deutz itself
and looked ready for demolition. It was certainly
hard to find. You needed to know the
house number to find it. It didn’t even have
a sign saying “Lommerzheim” anywhere on the outside. There was a tiny little area to the side
where a few intrepid diners (it was rainy and about 60° - typical June weather
in Cologne) were eating. Ah-ha. The famous beer garden, tables now sodden after
hours of constant rain. I didn’t want a
table that badly. There was a crowd of people standing out in
front, though. This didn’t look
good. When we looked closer, though, we
saw that they all had beer glasses in one hand and a cigarette in the
other. Ah, so this was where all the
cigarette smoke was landing these days.
Maybe our chances weren’t so bad after all.
After one glance around the restaurant, we
could see that all the tables were occupied, but we asked a waiter anyway. “You can try your luck downstairs,” he
said.
Downstairs, it was cozy and even sort of
attractive, with a stained glass piece lighted up from behind. We found one sole empty table, and bolted for
it. A friendly Köbes, the word for waiter in a Cologne brewery, came and took our
order. I told him I had tried to reserve
a table on the phone. “What time did you
call?” he asked.
“Around five.”
“Oh, that’s when we get really busy. It was certainly too loud to hear any
messages.”
I didn’t know how to order. Could I eat a four-centimeter pork chop? Some friendly-looking people at a table
nearby were also eating pork chops. “Can
we split an order?” I asked them.
“Of course.
What do you think we did? I could
never eat one of these alone,” the woman answered. “Is this your first time here?” she asked.
After my affirmative answer, she said,
“You’re in for a treat.”
The beer was ice cold and delicious. My students were right about the beer. We could order the pork cutlets either “juicy”
or “well done”. We went for juicy chops
with onions. Two plates arrived for the
three of us, thickly laden with onions that threatened to spill off the
plates. We bit into the most tender and
flavorful pork chops we had ever eaten.
We couldn’t decide between French fries or potato salad, so we ordered
both. The French fries were crisp on the
outside. Inside, they were soft, like
comfortable tiny pillows, except you could eat them, and they had that earthy
potato flavor. The potato salad was
creamy, with a slight mustard tang, a perfect balance to the pork chops. With that order, we had practically exhausted
the menu. There wasn’t much left to
choose from, but it didn’t matter. We
couldn’t have ordered any better solace for the months of separation to come.
It’s hard to imagine a restaurant that
could be plainer, but also more comforting.
Perhaps that is the charm.
Perhaps what draws people to this restaurant is not only the food and
beer, but its unpretentiousness. My
husband Peter shivers each time we pass a restaurant with cold halogen
lighting, pale, bare wooden tables, chrome and mirrors. In this frenetic, insecure age, more and more
people seem to need warmth, comfort, and the solidity of honest age, devoid of
facelifts. We crave friendly waiters and
fellow customers who aren’t too reserved or uppity to talk to us, just as much
as we crave the security of comfort food.
I asked the Köbes about Lommi. “Did you
know him?”
“Oh, yes.
I worked for years with him.”
“How did he manage to get permission to be the
only restaurant outside of Päffgen itself to sell this beer?”
“He was a Köbes there for years, and he won the trust of the
owners.”
There it was. Lommi was trustworthy, and he created a
restaurant with the same honest, straightforward core from which he lived an
entire life. He built a legacy which
lives on. After his death, and after his
widow retired from serving Kölsch to
what must have been hundreds of thousands of visitors, she sold the restaurant
to Päffgen, who promised to maintain the restaurant in the décor in which they
received it. The owners of Päffgen, also
following in the tradition of their founder, also proved trustworthy. The only thing that has changed is that Lommerzheim
has been brought up to hygienic and construction standards. For instance, the kitchen and restrooms are
clean.
“This is one place I’m going to bring my Korean
friends when they come to Cologne,” Jon said as we walked back to the tram. “I can’t wait to tell my students about it,”
I said. I love it when my students teach
me things.
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| Me eating there again - I forgot the onions! They came later. |
Lommerzheim
Siegesstrasse 18
Köln-Deutz (tram stop on 1, 3, 4, 7 and 9 -
Bahnhof Deutz)
Telephone:
0221/ 81 43 92
Opening hours: 11-2:30 pm, 4:30 pm – 1 am; closed Tuesdays
Credit cards not accepted.
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