In search of lost schnitzel

After having cooked dinner every night since getting to Heidelberg, in a kitchen enough better than the Paris dorm situation to make multi-dish meals possible, but a communal kitchen it's necessary to fight for burners in all the same, I was about ready to eat out for the sake of not having to deal with the pan, the one my husband and I both have a go at cleaning, but on which the char doesn't budge, and you can't soak it because someone else will need it, or at least the sink/counter space, and no, no dishwasher. I was hungry enough that I figured, how bad could #42 of the 255 restaurants in Heidelberg be? Well, precisely as bad as a bad sauce on overcooked frozen vegetables - and very randomly-selected vegetables, plus a whole lot of bean sprouts, yes, in Germany - could be. I mean, I've never been to Thailand, and the ideal to which I was comparing this was Chelsea Thai, where food comes on trays and where "quality" is not one of the draws, but where the food ranges from very good to the kind of thing you dream about when out of town. Or the Snail in Hyde Park, or even the decent-ish place not far from the dorm in Paris. So it wasn't an authenticity issue, or being accustomed to the more haute Thai food the West has to offer. This was just, well, bad.

As I was pushing the food around and trying to make the best of it, in walked a group of very authentic-looking retiree-sorts, of the German variety. My husband told me that they'd just asked the hostess where they could find schnitzel. I shot him a look that said, isn't that joke a bit obvious/xenophobic? Or possibly articulated that reaction as well. But he insisted that this was really happening, and I turned around and heard the hostess say "schnitzel," while pointing the group in the direction of a nearby beer garden.

The moral of the story is, my husband is not a xenophobe, and those folks had the right idea.