German Food in St. Louis: What to Order and Where It Came From
Revised October 19, 2026
What is the German area of St. Louis called?
Historically, the South Side. Soulard and Benton Park came first, then Dutchtown (the name is a corruption of Deutsch) and Bevo Mill as families moved south. There is no single official Germantown in St. Louis today, but that is where the German churches, breweries and bakeries clustered, and where the food tradition still shows.
Keep reading ↓The plate comes down and it hangs off both edges. A breaded cutlet the size of the menu, a wedge of lemon, a mound of something that looks like potato salad but isn’t mayo-based, and a pile of purple cabbage you didn’t ask for. The server says “Jäger” like you should know what that means. You nod. You don’t.
That was me, years ago, in a beer hall on the South Side, and I grew up here. I knew the word schnitzel. I knew the word bratwurst. Past that, the menu might as well have been in Greek, except it was in German, which in St. Louis is a little embarrassing. By history this is one of the most German cities in the country, and most of us can’t order past the first two lines.
So this is the guide I wish I’d had. Why the city is so German in the first place, what the old German neighborhoods were called, what to order the first three times, how a German day of eating is actually built, and how to read a menu without holding up the line. No restaurant names. That’s what the directory is for.
What is the German area of St. Louis called?
The South Side, historically. Soulard and Benton Park came first, in the decades before and after the Civil War, when German families packed into the brick blocks south of downtown within walking distance of the breweries. Then the population pushed south and west: Dutchtown, Bevo Mill, Carondelet. There’s no single official Germantown in St. Louis today, but that’s where the German churches, breweries and bakeries clustered, and where the food tradition still shows.
Dutchtown is the giveaway. The usual story, and the one most local historians repeat, is that the name is a corruption of Deutsch. English-speaking neighbors heard “Deutsch,” said “Dutch,” and it stuck. Same thing happened to the Pennsylvania Dutch, who are also German. Nobody from the Netherlands was involved.
Bevo Mill is a later chapter. The windmill building the neighborhood is named for went up in the 1910s, built by one of the city’s brewing families, and the “Bevo” part comes from a near-beer they sold through Prohibition. That’s St. Louis in one sentence. Even the neighborhood names are about beer.
Soulard is the one you can still taste. Walk it on a Saturday and you’ll pass the old market, catch the brewery smell on the right day, and see enough brick to build a second city. If you want a full rundown of the eating there, I already wrote one: where to eat in Soulard, a local’s guide. Read that after this.
Why did Germans immigrate to St. Louis?
Cheap land, a river, and a book. In the 1820s a German writer named Gottfried Duden farmed for a few years along the Missouri River, went home, and published a glowing account of the place. It sold. Germans read it as a promise of vineyards and freedom on the frontier, and a first wave started arriving in the 1830s, mostly farmers and tradesmen, settling St. Louis and the river towns west of it.
Then 1848 happened. Revolutions broke out across the German states, they failed, and a lot of the people who’d fought for them had to leave in a hurry. The ones who landed here are still called the Forty-Eighters. They were educated, political, and loud. They started German-language newspapers, singing societies, and gymnastics clubs, and when the Civil War came they were a big reason Missouri didn’t go with the Confederacy.
By the second half of the 1800s, Germans were the largest immigrant group in St. Louis, and it wasn’t close. Whole parishes ran in German. Schools taught in German. The breweries, dozens of them at the peak, were almost all German-run, because lager is a German invention and the limestone caves under the South Side kept it cold before anyone had refrigeration. That’s the whole reason the industry took root here.
Two world wars sanded most of that down. Berlin Avenue became Pershing. German stopped being taught, the newspapers folded, and a lot of families quietly became just American. But the food never left. It went into church picnics, the backyard, and the sausage counter. Which is where you find it now.
What is the most popular German dish?
Schnitzel, in the U.S., and it’s not a close race. Every German restaurant in St. Louis sells more schnitzel than anything else on the menu, and I’d bet most first-timers order it. In Germany itself the answer is fuzzier. Bratwurst, currywurst, and schnitzel all get argued for, and sauerbraten gets called the national dish by people who like the sound of it. More on that in the FAQ.
Schnitzel, and what the adjectives mean
A schnitzel is a thin cutlet, pounded flat, breaded, and pan-fried. That’s it. The word in front of it on the menu tells you the meat and the topping. Wiener Schnitzel is veal, by the strict Austrian rule, and if a place lists it “Wiener Art” that means “Vienna style,” which means pork. Most schnitzel in St. Louis is pork. Nothing wrong with that.
Jägerschnitzel comes with a brown mushroom gravy. Jäger means hunter. Paprikaschnitzel, which older menus list under a name Germany has mostly retired, comes with a pepper-and-onion sauce. Rahmschnitzel gets a cream sauce. Order it plain the first time with a squeeze of lemon, and you’ll understand why the Germans never bothered improving it.
Bratwurst and the rest of the wurst
Wurst just means sausage, and Germany has something like a thousand of them, so nobody expects you to know them all. Bratwurst is the grilled pork one, usually pale, served with mustard and a roll or with sauerkraut. Knackwurst is short, fat, and snaps when you bite it. Bockwurst is milder and smoother, often boiled. Weisswurst is the white Bavarian one, and there’s a whole ritual: you peel off the skin, dip it in sweet mustard, and, in Munich anyway, you’re supposed to finish it before noon.
Currywurst is the odd one out. It’s a chopped bratwurst under ketchup dusted with curry powder, a Berlin street-stand thing from after the war, and it’s wildly popular over there. If you see it here, get it as a starter to share. Then go buy real bratwurst by the pound. A St. Louis butcher counter is where the good stuff lives, and I’ve already looked at whether a St. Louis butcher is cheaper than the grocery store if you’re curious.
What else should you order after schnitzel?
Sauerbraten, rouladen, spaetzle, red cabbage, and potato pancakes. That’s your second and third visit, and between the five of them you’ll have hit most of what a German grandmother would cook on a Sunday. Order at least one of the meats and both of the sides. Split them if you have to.
The meats
Sauerbraten is a pot roast, usually beef, marinated for days in vinegar, wine, and spices, then braised and served in a sweet-sour gravy. A lot of kitchens thicken that gravy with crushed gingersnaps, which sounds strange and tastes right. Rouladen are thin sheets of beef rolled around bacon, onion, mustard, and a pickle, tied up and braised. They look fussy and eat like a stew. Schweinshaxe is a whole roasted pork knuckle with crackling skin, a Bavarian beer-hall centerpiece, and one is dinner for two.
The sides you should never skip
Spaetzle are little egg dumplings, somewhere between a noodle and a drop dumpling, scraped or pressed into boiling water. Käsespätzle is the same thing baked with cheese and fried onions, and it’s the best thing on many menus that nobody orders. Rotkohl, sometimes listed as Blaukraut, is red cabbage cooked down with apple, vinegar, and a clove or two. Sweet-sour. It cuts through everything fried.
Kartoffelpuffer are potato pancakes, shredded and fried crisp, and the traditional partner is applesauce, not sour cream. Yes, applesauce. Try it before you argue. German potato salad, at least the southern kind, is warm and dressed with vinegar, bacon, and onion, no mayo. And a soft pretzel with butter or sweet mustard isn’t an appetizer so much as a way to hold your beer.
Dessert
Black Forest cake, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte if you want to say it, is chocolate sponge layered with whipped cream and sour cherries soaked in kirsch. The real one has enough brandy that you notice. Apple strudel is technically Austrian, but nobody at a German restaurant is going to card it. Thin pastry, apples, raisins, often warm with vanilla sauce. If they’ve got Bienenstich, a honey-almond cake with custard in the middle, get that instead and thank me later.
Dirndl or lederhosen not sitting right before Oktoberfest? A St. Louis dressmaker can fix that.
What do Germans usually eat for dinner?
Bread. That surprises Americans, but the traditional German dinner is Abendbrot, literally “evening bread,” a cold spread of dark bread, sliced cold cuts, cheese, pickles, maybe some radishes, and a beer or tea. It’s eaten early, around six, and it’s light on purpose. The big hot meal of the day is lunch.
That’s the piece most St. Louis diners miss. In the old structure, Mittagessen, the midday meal, is the main event: the schnitzel, the sauerbraten, the potatoes and cabbage, all of it. That’s why German restaurants here do such a good lunch trade, and why the lunch plates are often the same size as dinner. Modern Germans with office jobs have shifted a lot of that to evening, same as everyone else. The grandmothers haven’t.
Breakfast, Frühstück, is bread rolls, Brötchen, with butter and jam on one side of the plate and cold cuts and cheese on the other. Add a soft-boiled egg in a cup with a tiny spoon, coffee, and on the weekend maybe a sliced tomato or some smoked fish. It looks like a lot for morning. It is a lot for morning. And then there’s Kaffee und Kuchen around three or four in the afternoon, which is exactly what it sounds like and a national institution.
If you want to eat the German way at a St. Louis beer hall, that’s the move: go at noon, order the heavy plate, and treat dinner as a pretzel and a wurst with a beer. Your stomach will thank you around nine o’clock.
What is German comfort food?
Anything a German grandmother would put on the table on a rainy Sunday. In practice that means the braised meats, sauerbraten and rouladen, plus the dumplings, the potato dishes, and the one-pot stews. It’s food built for a cold climate and a long working day. Fat, vinegar, starch, and cabbage, in some combination, over and over.
Eintopf is the stew category, and the name literally means “one pot.” Lentils with sausage, split pea with smoked pork, potato soup with a sliced wiener floated in it. Frikadellen are pan-fried meat patties, halfway between a meatball and a burger, eaten hot with mustard or cold from the fridge at midnight. Königsberger Klopse are meatballs in a creamy caper sauce, which sounds like something from a hotel and is actually a school-lunch staple.
Then there’s the whole potato department. Bratkartoffeln are fried potatoes with bacon and onion. Knödel are dumplings, made from potato or from old bread, the size of a tennis ball, served under gravy. Kartoffelsalat, the warm one. Pommes with mayo. In my experience the Germans have done more with the potato than anyone but the Irish, and they’d probably argue the point.
Maultaschen deserve a mention. They’re a big square dumpling from the southwest stuffed with meat, spinach, and bread, and the legend is that monks invented them to hide meat from God during Lent. You get them in broth, or sliced and fried with egg. If a St. Louis menu has them, the kitchen is serious.
How do you read a German menu?
Learn ten words and the rest falls into place. Schwein is pork. Rind is beef. Huhn or Hähnchen is chicken. Kartoffel is potato, Kraut is cabbage, Wurst is sausage, Brot is bread, Käse is cheese. Braten means roast, so Schweinebraten is roast pork and Sauerbraten is, well, sour roast. Gebraten means fried or roasted. Hausgemacht means homemade, and it’s a good sign.
The sections usually run Vorspeisen, starters, then Hauptgerichte, main courses, then Beilagen, sides, then Nachspeisen, desserts. Suppen is soups. If you see Tagesgericht, that’s the daily special, and it’s often the best value on the page and the cook’s favorite. A lot of St. Louis menus print the English under the German, but not all, and the ones that don’t are frequently the ones worth learning the words for.
Beer is the other half of the menu, and you can go deep on it. Helles is the pale Munich lager, easy and clean. Pils is hoppier and drier. Dunkel is dark and malty without being heavy. Weizen or Hefeweizen is the cloudy wheat beer with the banana-and-clove smell. Kölsch is the light one from Cologne served in skinny glasses. A Maß is a full liter in a glass mug, and a Radler is beer cut with lemon soda for people who have to drive. I’ve written a separate piece on visiting a St. Louis brewery taproom, and most of it applies in a beer hall.
One more. If the menu says “mit” it means “with,” and “ohne” means “without.” That’s enough to survive.
Where does Hermann fit in?
Hermann is the wine-country cousin. About an hour and a half west of the city on the Missouri River, it was founded in the 1830s by a German settlement society that wanted a town where the language and customs could survive intact, and to a surprising degree they did. The hills around it are the Missouri Rhineland, and the wine industry there is one of the oldest in the country. It’s the same immigration story as the South Side, just with grapes instead of hops.
The food in Hermann is what you’d get in the city, with a smaller-town accent: wurst plates, sauerkraut, schnitzel, and a lot of things made in-house because there’s nowhere to order them from. Go for the wine festivals in spring and fall, or for Oktoberfest, which runs every weekend in October and is the closest thing Missouri has to Munich. Book a room early. Everybody has the same idea.
For a regular Saturday, though, the South Side does the job. Soulard for the market and the beer smell, Dutchtown and Bevo Mill for the deep cuts, and any of them for a pretzel the size of your head.
German and Czech kitchens share a border and a lot of the same cold-weather logic, so if the dumplings caught your eye, read what Czech food is and what to order in St. Louis next.
Hungry yet? Browse German food across the St. Louis metro on St Louis Near Me Directory, then go at noon, order the schnitzel plain the first time, and save the sauerbraten for the second visit.
If you run a business in this line of work, list your business.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Germans immigrate to St. Louis?
A mix of cheap farmland, a river that reached the frontier, and a well-timed book praising Missouri that sold across the German states in the 1830s. The bigger wave came after the failed revolutions of 1848, when political exiles, the Forty-Eighters, fled and many landed in St. Louis. By the late 1800s Germans were the largest immigrant group in the city, running breweries, newspapers, churches, and schools in their own language.
What is the most popular German dish?
In St. Louis and most of the U.S., schnitzel: a thin, breaded, pan-fried cutlet, usually pork here, veal for the strict Wiener version. It outsells everything else on a German restaurant menu. In Germany the everyday favorite is closer to bratwurst or currywurst, eaten standing up at a stand. If you only order one thing on a first visit, make it schnitzel, plain, with lemon.
What is Germany’s national dish?
There isn’t an official one, and Germans will argue about it. Sauerbraten, the vinegar-marinated pot roast, gets called the national dish most often, especially by cookbooks. Bratwurst and schnitzel have strong claims by sheer volume, and currywurst is the sentimental Berlin pick. Regional pride matters more than the country as a whole: a Bavarian and a Rhinelander don’t agree on much at the table.
What do Germans usually eat for dinner?
Traditionally, Abendbrot: a cold evening spread of dark bread, sliced cold cuts, cheese, pickles, and maybe a beer, eaten fairly early. The hot main meal was lunch. Many modern German households have moved the warm meal to evening because of work schedules, but the bread-and-cold-cuts supper is still common, especially with older families. Eating a heavy plate at a St. Louis beer hall at night is more American than German.
What is German comfort food?
Braised meats and starch. Sauerbraten, rouladen, and pork roast under gravy, with dumplings, spaetzle, or fried potatoes and a pile of red cabbage or sauerkraut on the side. Eintopf, the one-pot stew, is the weeknight version. Frikadellen, pan-fried meat patties, are what a German eats cold out of the fridge. It’s cold-weather food from a place with long winters, and it eats best when it’s gray outside.
What is a typical German breakfast?
Bread rolls, called Brötchen, with butter and jam on one side and cold cuts and cheese on the other, plus a soft-boiled egg in a cup with a tiny spoon and coffee. Weekends might add sliced tomato, smoked fish, or a sweet pastry. It’s a bigger spread than an American weekday breakfast, but it’s cold, and it’s meant to be eaten slowly with more than one cup of coffee.
Is Hermann, Missouri worth the drive for German food?
Yes, if you make a day of it. Hermann is about an hour and a half west of St. Louis on the Missouri River, founded by German settlers in the 1830s, and the hills around it are the Missouri Rhineland wine country. The food is the same wurst, kraut, and schnitzel you get on the South Side, with more of it made in-house. Go for a wine festival or an October weekend, and book lodging early.
What should I order at a German restaurant if I don’t eat pork?
More than you’d think. Sauerbraten and rouladen are beef. Königsberger Klopse are often beef or veal, though ask. Hähnchenschnitzel is chicken, and many kitchens will bread a chicken cutlet on request. Käsespätzle, the cheese-and-onion dumplings, is a full vegetarian meal. Potato pancakes with applesauce, red cabbage, and a pretzel round it out. Just check the potato salad, since the warm southern kind usually has bacon in it.
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.