On a sunny stretch of blacktop on Manitou Avenue last week, I was confronted with the best of Berlin's street food: a sloppy, gloppy, greasy, gleaming, wonderful concoction known as a currywurst.

It was handed to me from the window of one of those boxy white carnival stands that usually sell cotton candy, pork chop-on-a-stick, and the venerable funnel cake.

This time it was serving a warm bratwurst snuggled against a bed of hot fries under a blanket of bright red sauce ($4).

"It is one of our most famous snack foods in Germany, and I've been wanting to serve it for years because it is so good," said Uwe Dethlefsen, the curry wagon's owner and founder of Uwe's, one of the best German restaurants in town.

The currywurst is to Berlin what a good hot dog is to Chicago, or the right pizza slice is to New York - the fast, ubiquitous hometown gut bomb served on seemingly every corner, where the only thing more pervasive than the similarity of one joint to the next is locals' appetite for debating which is actually the best one.

Let there be no debate in the Pikes Peak region. Uwe's is the best currywurst stand around. In fact, it is the only currywurst stand in the Pikes Peak region ... or the state for that matter ...... or, very likely, in the entire Intermountain West.

After all, Colorado is not known for great street food. It's not that we don't love our snacks greasy, saucy, hot and fast. It's just that, as good Americans, we don't walk anywhere. Therefore, there are almost no walk-up restaurants. Instead, we breeze through drive-throughs.

And so, really, good street food only pops up when immigrants are involved. I'm talking about the excellent taco trucks on Federal Boulevard in Denver and their morning counterparts: the Hispanic women selling green chili breakfast burritos quietly out of coolers in their trunks. I'm talking about the Vietnamese guys who deliver spicy báhn mì sandwiches to Colorado Springs once a week.

And I'm talking about Dethlefsen, who, after decades in the Springs, wanted to bring a little bit of old Berlin to his new hometown.

The currywurst got started in the 1940s and quickly became a staple of Berlin's Schnellimbisse (fast lunch) stands. Today, Germans eat about 800 million currywursts every year, according to Berlin's new Currywurst Museum ("The multimedia monument to Germany's traditional snack").

"After jaegerschnitzel, it is probably our most popular snack food," Dethlefsen said.
It's pretty simple. A sauce, usually made from ketchup, paprika, curry powder and other spices, is heated up and sloshed over a traditional German wurst, which is usually cut up in pieces so it can be munched on the street with a tiny wooden fork. (The local version is uncut and served with a plastic fork and knife.) The whole thing is then dusted with more curry powder. It has that street-food bad-but-good addictiveness.

At Dethlefsen's stand, the sausage hails from the very good Sara Sausages in Monument.

You have your choice of the smoked bratwurst or veal brat. I went with veal.

It wasn't delicate or nuanced or sophisticated. But boy howdy, was it good. I should have asked for extra curry sauce for the fries.

The curry wagon also serves other things: both traditional German and traditional carnival.

The thin, breaded pork schnitzel ($5) is deep fried and served with curry sauce or as a sandwich (also with curry sauce). It's not bad, but hardly the best schnitzel in the region.

The absurdly giant smoked turkey legs ($6), which are pretty tough and not all that tasty, do have the advantage of acting as an effective defensive club, in case you happen to be mugged while eating one.

There is a chicken version of the currywurst, for people who don't do sausage.

But for my money, the wurst is the best.

Just thinking about it now makes me want to go get one.

Uwe's Currywurst
***(Absolut verbindlich)

Address: 107 Manitou Ave., Manitou Springs (in the Castaways parking lot)
Phone: None
Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. Some Saturdays the wagon goes elsewhere.
Entrees: $4-$6
Vegetarian: Fries
Alcohol: No
Credit cards: No