There is a particular kind of restaurant that Dallas doesn’t have enough of — the kind where the building itself is the first course. The Rathskeller in Fredericksburg is that restaurant. Fredericksburg sits about four hours southwest of Dallas in the Texas Hill Country, a small German-settled town of 12,000 people surrounded by vineyards, peach orchards, and limestone hills that turn gold in the afternoon light.
You walk down a flight of limestone steps off Main Street, duck through a low doorway, and find yourself in the basement of a building that was already old when Teddy Roosevelt was president. The walls are 1880s Hill Country limestone. The ceiling is low. The light is warm. The food is better than a room like this has any obligation to produce.
Continue reading
