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| - Our first experience at Sterle's was a bit of an odd one. We stopped in around 6pm on a Thursday. We entered through the main entrance walked down the long hallway and arrived at the hostess station. Nobody. We looked around. Not a soul. We could hear the sounds of conversation and sports on TV but still saw no one. Apparently, we were the only ones here outside of the staff that was engrossed in the World Cup action on the bar televisions. My wife actually had to walk inside the main dining area and flag someone down.
First of all, this place is huge. Imagine a massive open dining area with seating for something like 150 people and a stage/dancefloor area. Now imagine it completely empty. We were the only people there. Don't get me wrong, I loved having the place all to ourselves, it was just strange. No music, just the sounds of soccer in the background. The bar, seating for about 10, is off the the side. Lest I forget, there's also a huge biergarten out back with lots of canopied picnic tables and its own bar. Turns out, that's where a party of about 10 that we didn't see when we arrived had taken up residence. Wasn't so vacant after all. Moving on.
The atmosphere is something out of the old Bavarian restaurant playbook - murals depicting tree-lined landscape scenes with quaint castles and mountain scenes, backlit stained glass windows depicting flowers and dancing girls. It was both creepy and kitschy. The razor's edge between nightmare and dreamscape. I kinda liked it.
The beer list is skewed toward the traditional German-styles with a selection of five house beers all brewed off-premise by Sprecher Brewery in Wisconsin. There's a beer for just about every taste but I'd recommend the Black Lager and the Munken Weizen wheat beer to truly take your Slovenian dining experience to the next level. After all, what's a meal at Sterle's without the beer?
Our server was very friendly and accommodating, doting on us throughout our time there. I guess getting attentive service when you're the only diners in a restaurant shouldn't be all that impressive, but it was still nice. Waters were always full, she checked in often, and the kitchen paced our meal nicely.
Speaking of the meal, don't come here expecting to eat low-carb. Holy shit, the carbs. I probably had enough in me to run the Cleveland marathon twice after leaving. It's all old-world comfort foods here. Sausage, pierogi, chicken paprikash, spaetzel, wienerschnitzel, roasted pork and sauerkraut. I make it no secret that my German heritage makes me a sucker for this kind of grub. I was definitely ready to loosen the belt a few notches on this night.
Sticking with my goal of trying every soft pretzel in NE Ohio, we started with the Bavarian pretzels with beer cheese sauce. While the pretzels were your traditional stick variety they were soft, warm and well-salted. The real star was the beer cheese sauce that came with them. I could have eaten a bowl of the stuff all by itself. Delicious.
Our dinner was monstrous, easily enough to feed a family of four. We each got a side salad, small bowl of chicken paprikash, a plate with roasted pork, green beans, two pierogi and scalloped potatoes. We also got a bowl of sour cream and a bowl of apple sauce on the side for the pierogi.
Overall, the food was delicious, filling and definitely a taste of a generation gone by. The side salad was your typical out-of-a-bag lettuce mix with some sliced cukes and tomatoes on top. The Green beans were cooked a perfect al dente. The pierogi were a bit on the gummy side but the slight sweetness from the caramelized onions were a nice counter. The potatoes, called home fries, were reminiscent of something you'd get next to your eggs in the morning but very tasty and the pork, covered in brown gravy, was good just a bit dry.
The biggest let down for me was the paprikash. The sauce was quite thin and a tad bland and the chicken, bits of white meat, was tough and stringy. Mostly spaetzel and chunks of tomato, it just didn't hold a candle to some of the other renditions I've had in the city.
Dessert was another miss. Expecting the ethnic journey to continue with perhaps apple strudel or kuchen, we were instead served up a nearly frozen frosted brownie. Such a bummer. Just a plain, old brownie.
There's no doubting the character and charm of a place like Sterle's. It's dripping with a sense of self that Cleveland has all but nearly lost over the past 20 years or so. As the older generation dies off and the gentrification of the inner-ring suburbs continues, places like Sterle's risk being lost forever. Sure, Sterle's is a bit rough around the edges, stale perhaps. They could use a bit of an update. Sterle's is also a piece of my city that I don't want to lose and a piece of our heritage that deserves to be preserved.
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