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Late last year, Noto Italian Restaurant in St. Peters turned the lower level of its building into Bormio, which explores the Alps via northern Italy. Halfway through 2025, Bormio’s pork with a Ricola glaze (yes, Ricola) remains the new dish I think about most often.

You won’t find food quite so daring at Great Heart Brewing Co., which opened in February on Olive Boulevard in Olivette. But if the phrase Bavarian beer hall still sends shivers down your spine as you recall the disastrous Hofbräuhaus in Belleville — it stands abandoned now, an oom-pah Chernobyl — the German- and Swiss-inspired Great Heart will cleanse your palate and then stuff you with schnitzel.

Multiple schnitzels, if you prefer. The menu features a classic crunchy, tender plank of pork schnitzel. This needs nothing more than a squeeze of lemon and a side of vinegar-smacked German potato salad or tangled, creamy spaetzle. Chicken and even vegetarian schnitzels are also available.

Chef Tim Zenner also fashions Swiss-style cordon bleu, stuffing a piece of pork schnitzel with prosciutto and gooey, molten raclette. This runny cheese isn’t scraped tableside onto your plate, raclette’s most famous presentation, but it will still spill over the rest of your dinner.

Great Heart’s path to Olivette spans two continents and the better part of the past 200 years. Owner John Valentine is a sixth-generation brewer in the Anheuser-Busch family line, though he initially planned a career as a teacher and a football coach and fell in love with brewing through a job at Eagle Rock Brewery in Los Angeles.

After several years there, Valentine moved back to ӣ����Ƶ and worked at 4 Hands Brewing Co. before enrolling in a master-brewer program. This led him to Munich, Germany, where he fell in love with the beer culture and his future wife and co-owner, Helena.

Helena Valentine grew up in Bavaria and southern Germany with a close-up view of that culture. Her father worked — and continues to work — procuring hops for Anheuser-Busch, and he would bring her to meetings with hop farmers. From childhood, her fascination with this vital beer ingredient grew.

In ӣ����Ƶ, the Valentines searched nearly two years for a location for their brewery before they found the new development on Olive roughly halfway between Interstate 170 and North Lindbergh Boulevard. The exterior reminded them of German and Swiss architecture, to the point where, John says, “we just took a step back and said, ‘What is this?’”

I can’t picture the interior as anything other than a compact version of a Bavarian beer hall. The imposing bar dominates the main dining room. To one side, behind glass, the brewing equipment gleams. A high ceiling — high enough that there is a mezzanine with additional seating — keeps the space from feeling cramped.

Unsurprisingly, Great Heart’s beer selection favors German-style lagers and ales with some Czech-style beers as well. As I’ve previously written in this column, I no longer drink alcohol, so this review is focused on the food.

For its first four months, Great Heart offered counter-service at two separate counters. You ordered beer and other drinks at the bar, food at a window by the kitchen. During my visits, the brewpub shifted to table service. I can’t promise your meal will be hiccup-free, but I never would have guessed I’d eaten here on the first night of table service if my server hadn’t told me.

Jim Fiala, the celebrated chef of the Crossing in Clayton and Acero in Maplewood, helped the Valentines plan Great Heart’s kitchen and introduced them to Zenner, their chef. Zenner would boast an impressive resume if he had only cooked at Fiala’s restaurants, but he has also worked at Annie Gunn’s in Chesterfield.

Often, Zenner’s exacting technique is enough to distinguish the menu’s familiar beer-hall fare. The beer batter in an order of fish and chips is crisp and almost effervescently light — think tempura — while the Atlantic cod it enrobes is ideally tender, just barely flaking with each bite.

Zenner cooks the fries accompanying the fish, and available elsewhere on the menu, in beef tallow. Without delving into the bizarre and, frankly, stupid seed oils vs. beef tallow subplot of our inexhaustible culture wars, I will say beef tallow makes for a crisper, tastier fry.

Great Heart’s bratwurst is downright elegant. Inspired by the Valentines’ favorite restaurant in Switzerland, Zenner plates one plump roasted sausage — about two ballpark brats’ worth of wiener — in a swanky red wine-veal reduction with a sweet touch of caramelized onion.

On the side is a generous wedge of rösti, the Swiss potato dish that will tickle your love of latkes or hash browns. This is hefty enough to pass for your main course, and Great Heart isn’t a restaurant where “light” or “refreshing” will come to mind. But even as I write during the summer’s first heat wave, I still must recommend the hearty gulasch, hunks of fork-tender braised beef in a sauce zippy with paprika.

There are pretzels, of course, with dips (mustard, various cheese preparations). And Alpine or not, a brewpub in 2025 must serve a smash burger: two skinny, lacy-edged patties with your choice of cheese on a tallow-toasted bun. I picked American cheese for my burger but still yodeled my approval.