[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Bier International is another one of the crop of new restaurants in the Harlem area locally known as the Gold Coast. It's not the official name of the strip of Frederick Douglass Boulevard between the park and 125th Street, but I like it, so I'm going to stick with it and spread the word. While not as big or rambunctious as the beer garden at Harlem Tavern up the street, it's still got a fair amount of personality and a great-for-the-area beer selection mostly consisting of German and Czech styles.

If Harlem Tavern is where you'll find the old school crowd and the lite jazz lovers, Bier International caters more to the ever-increasing population of Harlem hipsters, which means menus filled with terms like "100% preservative-free beef steak burger" ($12, exactly which burgers can you name in the city that aren't 100% preservative free?) or "Locally-produced, preservative-free pork & veal sausage" ($9, last I checked, salting meat to produce sausages qualifies as a preservative). That is, buzz phrases with little to no meaning or much grounding in reality for that matter.

That said, who really cares what a menu says as long as the food is good, right?

That preservative-free burger is indeed pretty tasty—nicely seasoned with a good amount of char-grilled flavor and served perfectly medium-rare as requested. There's not much depth of flavor to the beef, nor much fat and juiciness to speak of, but I happily finished mine. With a soft, sesame-seeded bun, it goes down pretty easy.

The hand-cut fries are nothing to complain about either, though they go soft and greasy pretty fast. Every once in a while the waiter would pass by with a plate of fries doused in truffle oil reeking of artificial flavoring. I still don't understand why anybody abides by the stuff.

Rumor has it that the place can get pretty rowdy on weekend nights, requiring you to lean into your conversations. Luckily, the oddly shaped wooden benches that line the walls virtually force you to lean forward at all times.

To be honest, you're much better off sticking to their selection of sausages, of which they have over a half dozen. The Bavarian Weisswurst is mildly spiced and comes slightly overcooked and grainy, but not to the degree that you can't cover it up with with their good honey mustard. Like most German sausage houses in the city, every sausage comes grilled, a method which can be tricky to pull off on a delicate, traditionally poached sausage like weisswurst. The flavor is great, but they haven't mastered the subtlety of perfect sausage grilling yet.

A side of cornichon pickles comes standard, as does a choice of fries, kraut, German potato salad, pretzels, or bread. The potato salad is hearty, especially the version studded with bacon, and the pretzels are outstanding. Crisp and deep brown with a nice fatty sheen and the dense-but-light interior of a great bagel.

Like the weisswurst, bratwurst also arrived overcooked and grainy.

Are poorly cooked sausages reason enough to keep me away from the area? Probably not. Honestly, I'd be happy coming here for a $15 flight of five beers (five-ounce pours of any five) and a couple of pretzels. It's great to have a friendly spot with a reasonably priced selection of good beers within walking distance of my apartment. Ample outdoor seating in the summer is just the icing on the cake, the mustard on the brat, the bacon in the German potato salad, the head on the Kölsch, the...nevermind. You get the picture.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

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