Mrs. Lime and I headed out for a weekend at a bed and breakfast in western Maryland. It was a Christmas present from my parents (told them not to get anything bulky so we could get it back to Maryland on the plane) and it was actually a very good thought on their part. I looked over the location where we were headed and picked out a few things to check out on our brief weekend trip.We took I-70 (yes, Baltimore is actually the place where I-70 starts on the east coast and you can take it all the way to KC) out of town, going west. After a couple of small traffic jams in the Friday night commute, we eventually got to Hagerstown, MD. Hagerstown is a relatively small town that has a lot of really neat older buildings in its downtown area. Seemed like a really good community to raise a family in. It's pretty laid back and quiet compared to Baltimore and surrounded by farmland.
I kept our destination a secret so Mrs. Lime would be surprised. We finally got there and she saw where we were going to eat. The name of the place is Schmankerl Stube. It was a corner restaurant in downtown Hagerstown that served old-school German food. I was extremely excited to find this place and it had rave reviews on the web.
We entered the place and we were immediately greeted by a man in a pin-stripe suit. His picture is on their website and also at the top of this blog (later found out his name was Charlie Sekula and he was a native of Germany). Evidently, he often comes to work in traditional German clothes. He was extremely friendly and asked how were were doing. I told him were were hungry. He said, "Boy, did you come to the right place!", in a heavy German accent.
Right then, I knew this was going to be a lot of fun. Let me premise this by saying that both sides of my family are heavily German, so this is the kind of food that my family was very familiar with and ate all the time.
The restaurant was nothing fancy, but at the same time it was very friendly. I mentioned to Mrs. Lime that it felt a lot like a beer garden. There was German dance music being played over the speakers, large beer mugs displayed everywhere, and everyone seemed to be smiling and having a really good time. The owner was constantly roaming around the restaurant, stopping to talk at different tables. You could tell from the conversations that most of the people were locals who regularly come to the restaurant.
I got a glass of imported German beer that was really tasty. It tasted similar to a pale ale beer with some honey taste in it. Really good stuff. We ordered the 'Combo for Two' for dinner. It was absolutely wonderful. The combo consisted of the following:
1) Beef Filet Medallions
2) Schnitzel (It's pork fried in a breaded crust)
3) Debreziner Sausage (Absolutely wonderful taste to this sausage)
4) Spätzle (A rough type of noodle. It was served with the filets on top of it and brown gravy)
5) Homemade Bavarian Bread Dumplings (My least favorite of the meal. I guess I expected more flavor that it had)
6) Sauerkraut (Best sauerkraut I've ever had. Had the usual sauerkraut sour taste with a 'bread and butter pickled' taste)
7) Apple-Flavored Red Cabbage (My wife didn't like this as much, so more for me!)
8) Green Beans wrapped in Bacon (My personal favorite. My grandma made this for me all the time.)
For dessert, we had two apple desserts. My wife had Apfel Strudel and I had Apfel Streusel. Both were served with ice cream and were absolutely wonderful. After dinner, we made the short 15 minute drive to the bed and breakfast just in time to catch the sunset you see below (we were at the top of a mountain looking down on a valley) before we went to bed for the evening.
