Jacob Wirth Co.

Getting in touch with the eternal truths, in link form

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Jacob Wirth Co. 31-37 Stuart Street (Theater District), Boston (617) 338-8586 Sun-Mon, 11:30 a.m.-8 p.m.; Tues-Thurs, 11:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m.; and Fri-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-midnight AE, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar Street-level access through rear entrance

With the holidays ahead and the fin-de-siècle hoopla mounting, I began to think it was time to get in touch with the eternal truths, and in the eating-out biz the truths don't get much more eternal than a bar that's been serving sausages and dark beer since the mid 19th century.

In 1868, when Jacob Wirth moved his restaurant into the brick bowfront building at 31 Stuart Street, the nearby Back Bay was a spanking-new development. Roxbury, the town where the rich spent their summers, had just voted to annex itself to Boston. That spring in Washington, a weak president had been impeached by a runaway Congress, then acquitted by the Senate.

A lot has changed since then. We've seen 25 presidents (26, if you count Cleveland twice), 13 new states, the telegraph, the horseless carriage, Pokémon. But not much has happened to Jacob Wirth's beyond some alterations in the details. The sawdust is gone from the floor. Also, there are 18 kinds of beer on tap.

Jacob Wirth's is so old that when it opened, there was no such thing as Germany. (German food came from a confederation of states under the thumb of Prussia.) Wirth himself was a Rhine wine importer who started a food operation on the side; over the years, German restaurants like his proliferated in America's downtowns, and a few survive in various cities. Not all of them have Friday-night sing-alongs like Wirth's, but hey, you have to adapt to the times. It hews to tradition in almost every other way: waiters in black vests and white shirts; a bare plank floor; a tall wainscoted room furnished with rows of plain four-person tables and bentwood chairs. Now that it's December, the carved oak paneling behind the bar is garlanded with fir and tinsel and lights, and while tucking into my bratwurst in the dining room I couldn't help thinking that it looked like a black-and-white photo of Christmas, 1880, brought to life without sentiment or cuteness. The modern touches are a four-foot tree strung with electric lights, and the music of Nat King Cole piped out to the chilly street.

In the food world, German cooking has pretty much fallen off the map; I can't think of a single new restaurant, besides the goofy Swiss-owned Marché Mövenpick, where you can eat sausage and sauerkraut. There is no German fusion food. There is no New German cooking. But maybe there shouldn't be; on the first cold snap of the year, it was hard to beat the real thing: a hot meal of knackwurst, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and warm potato salad. (This is the Jake's Special, $11.95.) A shiny half-loaf of brown bread came on a cutting board. The knackwurst, a plump all-beef sausage much like a jumbo kosher hot dog, delivered a satisfying pop when you bit into the skin; that pop, or knack, is where the sausage gets its onomatopoeic name. A dollop of grainy mustard, a bit of sauerkraut, and a sip of Jacob Wirth's Dark, and a man could forget how cold it is outside.

The real reason to order this plate, though, is the potato salad. It's served warm, flavored with apple-cider vinegar and chopped bacon -- a really delightful bass-treble combination that had me scooping up the mush after I'd eaten all the potato chunks. (The recipe, apparently, originated with Jacob Wirth's wife.)

The father of a friend of mine, who has been eating here for years, tells me that the food at Wirth's is better now than it's been in some time. This may be true, but you wouldn't say the kitchen has exactly broken out of its shell. The best stuff we had was the Jake's Special and a plate of wienerschnitzel ($14.50) in which the veal was pounded nice and thin, with a bready coating in loose undulations like a Shar-Pei's skin. It came over a bed of wide spiral noodles freckled with poppy seeds and tossed in an appealingly tangy lemon-butter sauce; a pot of sweet crimson cabbage came with it.

We were a bit less excited about the top end of the menu. A dish called "Jägerschnitzel" ($15.75) -- yes, wienerschnitzel in a Jägermeister-mushroom sauce -- wasn't particularly an improvement on plain old wienerschnitzel, although in a gesture of mercy the Jägermeister taste had been cooked out. And a "smothered sirloin" plate ($17.95) was just your basic potatoes and huge steak covered in salty brown gravy. The fisherman's platter may have been wonderful or awful; I'll never know, because it wasn't available the night we tried to order it.

Wirth's doesn't overplay the jolly-old-bierhall thing; our server was efficient, with a personality somewhere between a Durgin-Park waitress and a human being. She did break from her generally snappish Bostonian character to give a very impressive pronunciation of "Tucher Hefeweissen," a wheat beer that comes in an equally impressive bulge glass ($6). There are 17 other beers on tap, including many good German ones, mostly between $3 and $4 a pint. Considering its history, though, and considering how much I like German wine, I was sorry to find only a scant handful of German rieslings on the wine list.

The point of a place like Wirth's is just the opposite of most restaurants I visit; it doesn't invent, it maintains. It attracts people whose taste remains constant: businessmen, out-of-towners, construction workers, judges. Three guys in mustaches sat down at the table next to me and talked about work. "The day we poured the concrete was a Monday," one of them said. "We didn't start putting in the rebar until two weeks later." Nearby, 11 people marched up to a line of three tables, took their coats off simultaneously, and sat down. All 11 were men. It could have been the 19th century, except that the biggest table in the room was occupied by a co-ed group of aspiring lawyers surrounding a distinguished jurist in a tiny bow tie.

A lot of chain bars affect a scrubbed and polished 19th-century look, but the real thing has a very different feel. Jake Wirth's high open space and white walls and lack of polished brass would never pass muster with a corporate design consultant. A restaurant like this is beyond retro or revival or irony. It's a relic of how people congregated before any of us were born; it is just there, like a stone church in a town of ranch houses. Everyone should go once, and the holidays are as good a time as any for potatoes and apple strudel. You may leave grateful for the 20th century. Or you may wish the century had never happened at all.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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