Flashback to Helen, GA: the Hofbrauhaus Restaurant.

Helen is a strange, picturesque town of German design in the Georgia foothills.  The Chattahoochee river like the Rhine bisects the town, pushing a Bavarian-styled Huddle House against tubing outfitters and Rhineland package stores.  Beyond this charming/cheesy tourist vacuum, at the other end of things, is a restaurant/inn called the Hofbrauhaus.  It is here that we ate.
Bar staccato and smoke are the opening impressions of the Hofbrauhaus. A tight-wound staircase ascends from the atrium to the guest rooms, with the restaurant opening straight ahead.  A brooding, wooden interior muffles the proprietress’s greeting, who studies us behind a large registrar book.  She chews the German language with my family as she leads us to our table.  The dining room feels like a hunting lodge, the scenic Chattahoochee river pushing down the mountain in the surrounding windows.
The menu is in German coupled with quipy English translations, and there is much schnitzel and braten and schwein, with some chicken dishes and a local trout.  We opened with pommes frites and found, well, french fries, not much different than those in your freezer, served with Heinz ketchup. Next was a camembert appetizer, arriving in a large foil-wrap with toasts. The rinded, creamy cheese was warm beneath carrots, haricot verts, carmalized onions, apple slices and nuts.  Easily trumping the pommes frites, the baked cheese was a beautiful opener.
My entree was the sauerbraten, a beef round roast served in a brown gravy of buttery beef-consumme, thick with the nuttiness of rue.  A raspberry jam, as juxtaposed as Helen GA herself, puddled in the gravy with two generous potato dumplings. A plate of red cabbage sauerkraut glinted a fermented beet-sweetness to complement the meat. My dish felt authentic, felt like a working-class German meal on that thick, ceramic, farm-buffet plate.
My wife enjoyed her pork tenderloin, and her spaetzles had a wonderful toothy texture that absorbed well the mushroom gravy.  My father-in-law got the jager schnitzel, which he enjoyed while reflecting on his years in Germany.  He and my wife clinked great goblets of heffeweisen beer.  My mother-in-law had some anemic chicken breast, easily the least appealing dish on our table.  A butter-wine gravy tinted the chicken, but there was not much she seemed to enjoy on the dish.  Nor was she impressed with her schorle, a reisling spritzed with soda water.
Dessert, however, was scrumptious.  We shared a cold highball of thick vanilla ice cream layered with raspberries.  The apple strudel was charmed with a conservative sweetness, a delicate balance of smooth cream against firm apples. The coffee was as dark and aromatic as the dining room. 
Service was briefly apologetic to my mother-in-law over the schorle before bringing more seltzer water.  Mixing a light drink is anti-intuitive, unnatural to a restaurateur, especially at the prices Hofbrauhaus charges.  The proprietress lapped our table twice, giving a history of Helen. Unfortunately the spiel was in German and thus lost on me, but I preferred listening to the crackly, trebled recordings of Wagner, Beethoven’s ninth, and German drinking songs.
Overall, the restaurant presented decent, hearty food.  But it served German peasant fare at the prices of refined food.  In fact, the whole town seems to snarl at tourists while simultaneously greeting them, mocking the passer-bys with high prices on anything from parking to food. Economic panthers. The kicker, and the ultimate downturn of events, was that our server included a gratuity on the check, failing to disclose this information.  I found that gesture to be a direct deception, and I read other complaints about this very thing. If you find yourself in Helen Ga, Hofbrauhaus is probably the best option for a German meal, but be prepared to pay more than you should, and watch for an included gratuity.

And now for something completely different- JumpinGoat Coffee.

JumpinGoat Coffee Roasters and Shop, Helen, Georgia, December 2010.
The serpentine mountain road that takes you through Nacoochee Valley into Helen Georgia does not warn you of the coming mountain cabins, cascading down the road as the Chattahoochee river flows behind (and sometimes beneath) them. Worn-paint walls struggle against winter and age, and hand-painted signs claim their wares. These rustic shopsteads avoid the final, fatal slide into the river, offering interesting wares, including the goods of a stone-wheel mill, glass arts, local pottery, and the JumpinGoat Coffee Shop.

The coffee shop is separate from the roastery, located above on the mountain, but the smell of dark coffee is a thick, aromatic tincture pushing against the vapors of winter. Inside the provincial cabin, the oiled pine planks groan beneath numerous bags of flavored and roasted coffees, neatly bulging out of wooden baskets. The attendant poured samples, including a chocolate coffee so rich and delicious, I thought they had coated the cup in mocha syrup. The JumpinGoat signature blend had interesting flavor notes, was energized and layered, smooth as the wooden floors. For my afternoon cup I chose the Nicaraguan Arabica, and man alive was this a cup of java! Hearty, deep, nutty, with some smoked-wood notes, I felt like I was drinking the essence of the place. A touch of cream and sugar extracted more flavor notes, and I felt a few cravings to go run the mountain. The sumatran looked superb, like a bean of polished onyx, but there was none brewed on that particular day.

 
If you are in the vicinity, the sign-laden JumpinGoat Coffee and the neighboring stone-wheel mill (fresh-ground grits with molasses!!) are excellent reasons to drive to Helen, Ga. By the time you reach the Nacoochee Valley, you will be ready for a hot cup of coffee, the perfect fuel for running trails or roaming shops.