Editorial
In-depth guides, local perspectives, and editorial stories on Munich's food, culture, and neighborhoods.
Munich has imported its Italian cooking the way it imports its operas, slowly, expensively, and with the conviction that doing it correctly matters more than doing it loud. The best rooms in the city for it are mostly in residential streets a tram ride from the centre, and the locals prefer it that way.
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Munich does not look like a third-wave coffee city. The streets are full of Wirtshaus and the Italian-espresso bar is the default. But in the last fifteen years a serious roastery and café network has put down roots in Glockenbach, Maxvorstadt and Westend, and it has nothing to do with Vienna.
Read storyWhen Tantris opened on Johann-Fichte-Straße in 1971, Munich did not have a fine-dining culture in any modern sense. Fifty-five years later, Benjamin Chmura runs the kitchen of a room that survived its founder, two refurbishments, and the entire German nouvelle-cuisine generation it produced, and the question is no longer whether it matters but what it now means.
Read storyBeyond the beer halls and the starred dining rooms, Munich runs a deep, quietly excellent Vietnamese kitchen, built by the second generation of families who arrived in the 1980s. The audience that already knows the Berlin Vietnamese stratum should know the Munich one is smaller, less photographed, and in a few addresses arguably more careful.
Read storyThe two weeks of Oktoberfest are not what most visitors expect, and the calculus of which tent to book, and which tent to walk past, has been refined by Münchners over decades. The Istanbul cosmopolitan visiting Wiesn for the first time should know the short version: not all tents are the same, and the food is the variable that separates them.
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The most famous beer hall in the world is the one Münchners least frequent. The real map runs through Augustiner courtyards, a Schneider corner near Tal, and a Paulaner cellar above Giesing, and once you read it, you stop going to Platzl entirely.
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Munich's couture mile is read by most visitors as Bond Street, by most journalists as Old Money, and by most residents as a stretch they cross at thirteen-thirty for a particular kind of lunch, quiet, unhurried, and entirely unlike the version Maximilianstraße becomes after dark.
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