Passing the Bar: Loreley

Loreley is the name of the river maiden who in legend perched herself high over the Rhine and lured mariners with her singing. At the new Loreley Restaurant & Biergarten, the singing is in short supply—unless you happen to stop by during a soccer match. What should lure the thirsty and the hungry to this Williamsburg port are the almost two-dozen German biers, the schlachtplatte (a plate full of smoked pork chops, rib bacon and smoked sausage), the apfelstrudel with vanilla sauce and the hope of a warm Brooklyn evening.

It’s nothing that science can prove, but the need to stretch out on solid patio furniture and pour steins of cold (German, in this case) beer down a parched throat appears to be in the DNA of the dwellers of Williamsburg. indeed, on a recent weekday evening, hankering for a liter of weiss beer, I made my way to Loreley (which is a sibling of the rivington street restaurant of the same name) and, at 9 in the evening, found it packed with a young crowd despite stiff competition from the Radegast, Spuyten Duyvil, Berry Park and the many other nearby watering holes.

Perhaps you could blame the crowd on gemutlichkeit, the German concept that means comfy and cozy. The patio tables at Loreley are long and communal, elementary-school-cafeteria style. the packs of spatzle-eaters and Kolsch-drinkers were shoehorned in, making conditions ripe for conversation to flow up and down the tables. Not that cell numbers were swapped—at least with me—but nobody seemed put off by friendly talk.

After a waitress walked my group through which kind of pilsner or lager would pair well with the wide variety of German comfort food, she told us that the bar sits on the site of an old, haunted gas station, and ghosts lurk about. Before my Weihenstephan hefeweissbier clouded my thoughts, i wondered why ghosts would bother spooking a gas station and was answered by a strange humming noise that turned out to be the traffic on the nearby BQE. I later discovered that our server might’ve been making up the ghost part of the story; the biergarten does sit on a wedge of land, though, I love the dark, malty style of German wheat beers, so I asked about the hefeweissbier at Loreley. “How wheaty do you like it?” the server asked—a question never before posed to me. “Really wheaty,” I said, as I was on a bit of a health kick at the time. On tap was Weizen Doppelbock, a draught heavy enough that you could hand-sculpt the foam into a loaf, bake it and break the resulting bread with your tablemates. But I recommend just drinking it.

Truth be told, I’ve come to dread joints that advertise themselves as “real” biergartens the way that Loreley does on the ballpoint pen I used to sign my credit card receipt. “Real” usually means a humiliated staff dusting off their two semesters of Deutsch while dressed in either a dirndl or lederhosen or a wool trenker hat and dancing the schuhplattler between shifts. happily, there was none of that at loreley. the servers, in street clothes, appeared well-trained on the authentic cuisine of renowned German chef Torsten Zeibold— even reminding me that Wiener schnitzel is thinly pounded pork, and would go well with my choice of draught beer.

All of that aside, though, the truest mark of a biergarten kitchen is in the pretzel. Loreley’s order came in three small, hand-sized, soft twists that arrived piping hot but, after several minutes, cooled off and became stiff and tasteless. i wondered if someone swapped them with a street vendor’s leftovers for a laugh. But who’d tamper with a man’s pretzel? Perhaps it could be those ghosts, but it’ll take more than scheming spooks to frighten off the patrons here.

>> Loreley restaurant and Biergarten

64 Frost St. (betw. Leonard & Lorimer Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-599-0025.