Dürkheimer Riesenfaß
St. Michael Allee 1
67098 Bad Dürkheim
This gigantic barrel gives new meaning to the song "ROLL OUT THE BARREL AND WE'LL HAVE A BARREL OF FUN!"
Bad Dürkheim is on the German Wine Route. The wine route is a scenic route which runs through Germany's second-largest wine-growing region. It starts in the south at the Wine Door in Schweigen-Rechtenbach and runs 85 kilometers to Bockenheim.
Inside the barrel
Fritz Keller built this multi-floor restaurant in 1934 in the town of Bad Dürkheim. If it actually held wine it would hold 1.7 million liters. Instead of it holding wine, this is a fun novelty restaurant.
If you really want to see the biggest wine barrel in the world, you must go to Heidelberg Castle, where you will see a barrel
built to handle 221,000 liters. (about 55,000 gallons)
The over-flow area in the restaurant has some cute little wine barrel seating.
I had the Markklößchen Soup. A German speciality. Our next door neighbor Oma (German for grandmother) first made this for me. I loved it! I will tell you how they make these meatballs, but many of you won't try them now. The meatballs are made of bone marrow. The Germans push the marrow out of the bones, mix it with spices and make a small meat ball that is dropped into soup. I know, I know, it sounds bad, but it is very tasty.
Mac had the smoked trout with horseradish sauce. This was excellent. What made it so unusual were the very thin pieces of hashbrowns sandwiched in with the trout.
Having had such wonderful appetizers, we were looking forward to our main meal. I had ordered Saumagen. This dish was the favorite of German chancellor Helmut Kohl. He had it made and served to high-profile guests such as Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand. It is typically served with potatos and sauerkraut. Most Americans will find this a bit off-putting as the meat is cooked in a pig's stomach. The literal translation of saumagen means sow's stomach.
This dish is a speciality of the Rhinland-Pfalz region. It is as important to the Pfalzer people as the Haggis is to a Scot. Nowadays the butcher shops sell it in a plastic casing, not the traditional stomach.
I must say that it was good but not as "spicy" as I would have liked. The greatest disappointment came when I realized the mound of potato underneath was "fake". It tasted like the Potato Buds you can buy in America.
Mac had the pork schnitzel and white asparagus with hollandaise sauce. The schnitzel was good but, Mac would have liked some gravy with it.
It's asparagus season now in Germany, so this is a very popular vegetable at the moment.
We decided not to have dessert.
We took the long way home through the Wine Route. It meadered through pretty little villages where people are starting to put their window baskets out.
The grapes do grow as far as the eye can see.
We decided to give the restaurant the thumbs up for the ambience and the starters. Even though we were a bit disappointed with the main meal it was a nice Mother's Day.
Happy Mother's Day to my Mom and
Happy Mother's Day to all my readers!
Great post!
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