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Bavarian Bier Cafe

Georgia Waters

German$$

Beer, fried meat, waitresses in miniskirts.

I'm not usually one to gender-alise about restaurants but it's not difficult to understand why the Bavarian Bier Cafe is so popular with blokes.

The first Brisbane outpost of the Sydney Bavarian Bier Cafe chain opened late last year as part of the redevelopment of Eagle Street Pier. The site of the former white-clothed Vino's has been transformed into a beer hall with a large bar and long benches on an upper level and room for dining downstairs or outside on a balcony overlooking the river. There's a few smaller tables for two available but this is clearly a place for group-dining, not dinner-dating.

Tonight, at least 70 per cent of the seats are occupied by males. Being a party of two, we're taken to one of the smaller tables and handed menus. I really like German food, and ate plenty of it when I was there on holiday last year. Before the Bavarian Bier Cafe came along there weren't a lot of options to get a fix of schnitzel and sauerkraut outside the German Club in Woolloongabba, which is one of my favourite places for a homecooked dinner cooked by someone else.

The starters are a mix of traditional dishes - goulash soup and flammenbrot (pastry topped with cheese and caramelised onion) and decidedly non-German salads (rocket and parmesan, nicoise, caeser, roasted beetroot). Later, it becomes apparent that ordering a salad would have been a good idea.

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Our order is from the house specials list - slow-roasted pork knuckle on mashed potato with sauerkraut and Lowenbrau bier jus, $37.50, and a Bavarian tasting platter, $27.50. There's also a choice of nine schnitzels - chicken, beef or veal - and several mains for those not so keen on German food (beer-battered fish and chips, prawn linguine, steak).

The platter is a good choice for an introduction to German fare. There's a few small pieces of chicken schnitzel, two types of sausage and roasted pork belly served on apple compote, mashed potato and sauerkraut. The pork belly is the best of the lot, the skin perfectly crisp and salty with a layer of fat and tender meat beneath. It's on the menu by itself for $29. The schnitzel is fine, as are the sausages, and the sauerkraut could stand to be a little more sauer but is otherwise tasty.

The pork knuckle is enormous on its bed of sauerkraut and mash. Everything on our plates is brown (save some red cabbage on mine) and by the time we're finished I'm longing for something green and crunchy. This is our fault in ordering - we should have asked for a side of sauteed vegetables ($7.70) instead of the pretzel with butter ($3.50), which is soft and fresh but, again, brown. We pair them with good beers: a Paulaner pilsner and Löwenbräu original (both about $10 for 500mL), which are perfectly thirst-quenching for our salty, fatty dishes.

While we had great service ordering beers from the bar, the waitstaff, while definitely adding an attractive visual element to proceedings, are somewhat inattentive. Our empty plates sit before us for a full half an hour before they're taken away. For dessert, an apple strudel with vanilla anglaise ($12) is excellent, the pastry crispy and the Granny Smith apples just tart enough, but it arrives with un-asked for scoop of ice-cream that later appears on the bill for $2 and certainly wasn't needed with the anglaise.

Among all the bars and fine-dining restaurants in the CBD, there's not a lot of other places that fit the bill for a relaxed beer overlooking the river or gather with a group of friends for a fun, low-key dinner.

Just make your mother proud and order some greens.

 This reporter is on Twitter: @georgiawaters

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