Most people (by which I mean those with families, and those who don't entertain or travel for a living) tend to eat out at restaurants maybe a couple of times a month and when they do, are much more likely to have curry, Chinese or pizza, rather than the food that they could prepare at home. That was certainly what going for dinner at a restaurant meant when I was growing up. We'd occasionally go to a pub in a nearby village for a Sunday roast or posh restaurant in our local hotel (generally with guests or for a birthday) but this was to my mind generally an inferior version of the food my mother would cook and without the possibility of Angel Delight for dessert.
The rise of the gastropub may have given us another option, but things ain't changed much since the 80's and the same goes for Mittel Europe. There's little point travelling to provincial Europe and expecting to get a true sense of the local cuisine. It's like travelling to Grantham and expecting the best of British to be assembled for your delectation. It won't be.
Sure you can find plates of pork of various sizes; extruded into sausage (or wurst...), beaten into breadcrumbed submission as a schnitzel or simply served sliced with dumplings or gnocchi like spatzele. But this is often a pale imitation of the foods assembled in family homes, and just not what people (other than tourists) want to come out and eat...
The best meals we ate across Germany and Switzerland came in two restaurants recommended and frequented by locals, a trendy yet simple Thai in Luzern (at the same price as Michelin starred dining in London or New York, but that was the exchange rate rather than the locals ripping us off) and a Tex Mex joint in Freiburg where we joined families and students on dates to dine on cheap, inauthentic Mexican. How's that for fitting in with the locals...
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