Lederhosen

Sometimes, you are just in the mood for sausages.  Am I right?

We used to satisfy that craving with Currywurst Bros and Sausage, Inc. and incidentally, we've found another wiener-ific spot in the Village.  Lederhosen is the German equivalent of a gastropub.  I'm pretty sure after the sun goes down, the place flows with German/European beers.  However, we were here for a nice lunch on a sunny day and the sun streamed through the vast skylight overhead; the ambiance was very subdued.

Alex Jagendorf, the only real-ish German person I know, and I had the double lunch combos: two sausages with either fried potatoes or potato salad, sauerkraut, red cabbage, onions, and crusty bread with big dollops of grain mustard.  I had a plate of currywurst and kielbasa, while Mr. Jagendorf had the bratwurst and weisswurst.

An explanation, from my non-eastern-European brain:

- Currywurst is a sausage swimming in a ketchup-like sauce and dusted with curry powder.  Bizarre, you say?  Delicious, I say!  Currywurst is a fast food dish from Berlin that aptly represents the post-war diversification and journey of Germany.  I really enjoyed the currywurst, though it was a bit on the salty side.

- Kielbasa is a Polish sausage.  My undiscriminating palate just assumed this was a regular ol' sausage.  Plus, I was starving so I sort of...wolfed all the meat down.

- Bratwurst is a German sausage.  Ditto.

- Weisswurst, the only one I haven't heard of, is a Bavarian sausage with veal and pork.  Now, the weisswurst was kind of funny.  The texture was more porous than the other sausages...like it was made with more floury filler than with meat.  It was an interesting comparison between the salty bratwurst, but I couldn't really discern any sausage-y flavor or texture.

I actually quite enjoyed the sides, which provided small oases of relief between bites of savory sausage.  Overall, the lunch combos were delicious, hearty, and a bit guilt-inducing.  Not for every day, but definitely good for satisfying that craving.