Famous bearded German Karl Marx. Not pictured: fellow German beard-O Commie Friedrich EngelsWhat puzzles me about German bars is that, given the massive potential for total AWESOMENESS, in practice they usually aren’t that cool. After all, if Irish bars can hang portraits of James Joyce and play the Pogues all day, then surely German bars can put up a bust of Friedrich Schiller or Immanuel Kant and hire a guy in a powdered wig to plink out J.S. Bach on the harpsichord. Yet German bars are usually boring, with some dumb soccer shit on the walls and maybe a couple decorative beer steins on a high shelf near the top of the wall–and populated entirely by bearded dudes. Luckily, Prost in West Seattle bucks the boring German bar stereotype because it’s dark and classy. But there ARE plenty of bearded dudes inside. Some things don’t change.Bearded dudes like German bars because there are gallons and gallons of dark German beer and plenty of rich and meaty German food–like the Braunschweiger ($8)– to get stuck in the aforementioned beards. For that price you got a huge plate with a quivering column of the eponymous liver pate, rich and creamy, maybe a little grainy, and peppery with a hint of smoke on the finish. Accompanying the braunschweiger was a big pile of green apple wedges and slices of what the menu refers to as “landbrot,” but which is really just toasted bread.The Bavarian Pretzel ($5) is, predictably enough, a pretzel. But it was damn tasty: yeasty, with a glossy bronze crust that cracks when you bite it, yielding to a soft and fluffy center as steamy as dirty text messages sent to an ex at midnight. The pretzel is a good portion. It’s about eight inches across, and while that might be small compared to my cock, it certainly is a lot of bread to choke down (but I bet your mom can choke it down). The pretzel comes with a small mound of kosher salt and two mustards: a tangy, grainy seed mustard, and a horseradish honey mustard which the owners of Prost should start referring to as “Christina Hendricks” because it was so fucking hot it took my breath away.Luckily there was plenty of beer to wash the smoking hot honey mustard bombshell off my tongue: a half-liter of Spaten Optimator ($5.25) boasts a 7% alcohol content AND has a name that sounds like one of the shitty latter-day Transformers that they had to keep introducing to the cartoon in order to keep selling toys. The Optimator was sweet and burly and dark, with a bitter twinge on the finish, and is the perfect thing to drink at Prost, in the dark, on a dreary winter afternoon, while you try to grapple with a dusty copy of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Don’t forget to trim your beard.Rating: 6.5 dialectics out of 10Prost is located at 3407 California Ave SW206-420-7174