German dining

I met up with the rest of my coworkers yesterday at the car rental counter in Stuttgart airport. Even car renting is an exciting experience in Germany - walking down the garage aisles all you pass are BMWs, Audis and Mercs. Meanwhile, back in the US I'm usually told that I'll be squeezing into a "sporty compact", usually built for a midget and with all the horsepower of a mule-drawn carriage.
From the airport it was off to the small town of Ragindingen, where the hotel was a small, cosy building just off the town river. The hotel is something that I would describe as having "character", but Saeeda would describe as "old." And old it was, since there was no central air conditioning and an elevator straight out of the 60s. Still, I liked the ambience - no two rooms were the same, and all the furnishings had an Old World feel to them.
Our first meal in Germany? Italian food. Excellent Italian food. Which left me really confused at the end of the night, because I had yet to try to typical German food, which in my mind consisted of high calory, saucy, beef/pork boiled in various ways. Why didn't I expect there to be a thriving dining scene in German cities? Ignorance.