Aficionados of carved clocks, diminutive deer horns, kitschy Alpine scenes, and, yes, accordion music, are bound to feel at home here; the waitress even wears some sort of dirndl, poor baby. The rest of us are likely to feel less gemütlichkeit and more time warp. Oddly for a restaurant of this price level (mains peak at $17), you order at the counter, then Heidi quickly brings you your food. Too quickly in our case.

But we’re not going to dwell on the split pea soup with ham; it lacks depth and herbal interest. The salad, sporting soft green beans and a sweetish, red wine vinaigrette, is tolerable, but there’s no point in lingering here either. Make room for the sauerbraten.

Though there are doubtless dozens of recipes, this wouldn’t be our favorite; the beef is sliced too thin to be convincingly cut to order from a warm, marinated roast, the sharply sweet-sour sauce lacking natural body (no gingersnaps?), and the spicing seems to favor cloves over juniper. The clumpy, springy spätzle, having little taste of their own, benefit from a bath in the sauce, but the side of red cabbage is intolerably sweet. Some among us (the same tasters who have derided the wursts) have praised the jaegerschnitzel with mushroom gravy, however, and we’ve been alerted not to ignore house-baked pastries.

Ach du lieber…this may be the restaurant’s redemption as both the dense hazelnut cake and the full-bodied Bavarian cream are zehr gut indeed.