NYTIMES: Gottscheer Hall Tap Room
GOOD spirits make for rousing dinners, but on the evening of the annual Jaegerball, they nearly crowded out our kassler rippchen and baked spaetzle. The local rod and gun club, joined by hundreds of friends and family, had assembled for dinner and dancing in the main ballroom of Gottscheer Hall. But many lingered in the public taproom, clustering near the television — and nearly screening off the server from our table — to follow football.
Most nights in Ridgewood, Queens, the Gottscheers (got-SHAY-ers) are fewer, and mellower. The hall was dedicated in the 1920s by immigrants from Gottschee — once an enclave within Austria-Hungary, now part of Slovenia — and revitalized with another wave, displaced by World War II. The surviving members of that later generation are advanced in years, and their adult children usually speak in long-settled New York accents rather than the Bavarian dialect called Gottscheerish.
Gottscheer Hall Tap Room
657 Fairview Avenue (Gates Avenue), Ridgewood, Queens, (718) 366-3030, GottscheerHall.com.
BEST DISHES Italian wedding soup, krainerwurst, goulash with spaetzle, sauerbraten, kassler rippchen, bread pudding.
