There is a German restaurant in almost every American city, and the menu is more or less always the same: sauerbraten, schnitzel, a sausage, a mountain of sauerkraut, a stein of something dark. Nothing on that list is invented. It is just that if you sat down at a German table on an ordinary Tuesday evening, you would not find one of those things on it.
You would find bread. Cold cuts, a bit of cheese, maybe a boiled egg, and that is dinner, eaten without anyone switching on the stove. It has a name, Abendbrot (evening bread), and it explains more about how we eat here than any menu does.
The other thing to get out of the way early: there is no such thing as German cuisine. There are about a dozen regional ones, and the disagreements between them are old and taken seriously. A Swabian and a Bavarian will each tell you their dumplings are the correct dumplings. (Both are wrong. Thuringian dumplings are the correct dumplings.)
So this page is about how the eating works. For the dishes themselves, German food has a page of its own.
Bread Does the Heavy Lifting
Germany runs on bread the way Italy runs on pasta. The national bread register lists more than 3,000 recognized varieties, and in 2014 the tradition went into the German register of intangible cultural heritage. Half the internet upgrades that to a UNESCO world heritage listing. It isn’t one, it is the German commission’s own national list, which is still serious and still a different thing.
Three thousand kinds. Not a marketing number.
The trouble starts when you try to buy one. A bread roll is a Brötchen across most of the country, a Semmel in Bavaria, a Schrippe in Berlin, a Weck in the southwest, and a Rundstück in Hamburg. Use the wrong word and you will still get your roll, along with a small look.
Wurst Comes with Rules
Sausage is where German regionalism gets loud. A Nürnberger Rostbratwurst is barely finger-sized and arrives six or eight to a plate, as the Nuremberg restaurants will demonstrate. The Thuringian version runs about 20 cm (8 in) and gets grilled over beech charcoal. Neither region accepts the other’s as a real bratwurst.
Munich’s Weißwurst, a pale veal sausage, comes with actual rules. You order it in pairs, it arrives swimming in hot water, it goes with sweet mustard and a Brezn (pretzel), and you do not eat the skin. Purists zuzeln it, sucking the filling out of the casing, but slicing it lengthwise and lifting the meat out with a fork is entirely acceptable.
It is also not supposed to hear the noon bells. That rule dates from before refrigeration, when the sausage was made in the morning and had to be gone by midday. Refrigeration arrived. The rule stayed, and a proper Munich Wirtshaus (traditional inn) still stops at twelve.
One correction while we are here, because it trips up nearly every English-language food page. Leberkäse translates as liver cheese and contains neither, the Bavarian version having no liver at all by an exception written straight into the German food code. It comes out of the oven as a warm loaf, gets cut thick, and lands beside a fried egg and potato salad or inside a roll as a Leberkässemmel. Cold and gray under supermarket lighting is not how you want to meet it.
Berlin’s contribution came later. On a rainy afternoon in September 1949, in a city still full of rubble, Herta Heuwer mixed tomato paste with curry powder at her snack stand on Kantstraße and poured it over a sliced sausage. She called it a patent for the rest of her life; what she registered in 1959 was a trademark. The patent office says plainly that nobody can prove who first put sauce on a sausage, but Berlin claims it anyway, and half the Berlin restaurants keep a version going.
The Kitchens behind the Kitchen
If you only have room for one regional kitchen on a trip, make it Swabia, and start with the Stuttgart restaurants. Spätzle, ragged egg noodles scraped off a board into boiling water, turn up next to almost everything. Maultaschen are pasta parcels the size of a coaster, nicknamed Herrgottsbscheißerle, roughly “little God-cheaters,” from the story that monks hid meat inside dough so it couldn’t be seen during Lent.
Bavaria is the kitchen the rest of the world mistakes for the whole country: roast pork with dumplings, Obatzda (soft cheese mashed with butter, paprika, and onion), pretzels the size of your face. Franconia, the northern third of the state, bristles at being lumped in and has a density of small breweries nowhere else comes close to.
Head north and the fat changes from pork to fish. Hamburg does Labskaus, a mash of salt beef, potatoes, and beets under a fried egg, which looks alarming and tastes far better than it photographs. Grünkohl (curly kale) gets stewed for hours with sausage, and only after the first frost has been through the field, because that is when it turns sweet. Cabbage matters enough up there to have its own scenic route.
Saxony bakes. Thuringia grills. Both are serious about Klöße, potato dumplings the size of a tennis ball, and this is where I stop pretending to be neutral. :-)
Eat by the Calendar
Come in May, come again in November, and you have eaten in two different countries.
Spargel, white asparagus, is the big one. The season opens around mid-April and closes on June 24 every single year, a date growers call Spargelsilvester, asparagus New Year’s Eve. The reason is not sentiment: the plant needs about a hundred undisturbed days before the first frost, and cutting past the deadline costs you next spring’s crop. For those ten weeks restaurants print a separate asparagus card, and the Baden Asparagus Route exists for this window.
Autumn brings Federweißer, wine caught partway through fermentation, cloudy and still working. It comes in bottles with loose caps, because a sealed one would burst, and it doesn’t travel, so you drink it where it was made. Zwiebelkuchen (onion tart) goes with it. Then game season, then the Christmas markets open and the country spends four weeks eating standing up.
The Sweet Half
Somewhere around three or four in the afternoon, a good deal of Germany stops and eats cake. Kaffee und Kuchen is a meal with a slot in the day, not a snack, and on Sundays it comes close to an institution.
For gingerbread, learn one word and you will never buy badly again: Elisenlebkuchen. The German food code sets the bar at 25 percent almonds, hazelnuts, or walnuts and no more than 10 percent flour, and anything cheaper has to call itself something else. Consumer protection you can taste. “Nürnberger Lebkuchen” is protected on top of that, so it can only be baked in Nuremberg itself.
Lübeck owns marzipan the way Nuremberg owns gingerbread. The good stuff is mostly almonds with just enough sugar to hold it together; the cheap stuff is mostly sugar, and you can tell from across the room.
One more myth to retire, and this one is a favorite of mine. German chocolate cake is not German. It is named after Samuel German, an English-American chocolatier who made a sweet baking chocolate for Baker’s in 1852; a Dallas housewife used it in a 1957 newspaper recipe, the apostrophe fell off “German’s” along the way, and a Texas layer cake has been credited to us ever since. We’ll take the compliment, but actual German chocolate is a separate subject.
What Lands in the Glass
The Reinheitsgebot, the beer purity law, was issued at Ingolstadt on April 23, 1516, by the dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X. Everybody quotes it as four ingredients. Read the original and you find three: barley, hops, and water. Yeast is missing because nobody yet knew what it was doing in there.
Bavaria also has the oldest brewery in the world, and also doesn’t, depending on whom you ask. Weihenstephan in Freising dates itself to 1040 on the strength of a document historians regard as a forgery. Weltenburg Abbey on the Danube says 1050 and claims the title for monastery breweries. Both make good beer, which is the part that matters.
German beer is local to a degree that surprises visitors. Well over a thousand breweries are operating, roughly half of them in Bavaria, and a fair number sell almost nothing outside their own valley. Cologne drinks Kölsch from slim 200 ml (7 fl oz) glasses that a waiter keeps replacing until you put your coaster on top of the empty one. Düsseldorf drinks Altbier and regards Kölsch as an error of judgment. The two cities are 40 km (25 mi) apart.
German wine has changed far more than its reputation has. The soft, sweet stuff that flooded export shelves in the 1970s is not what gets made now: most bottles today are trocken (dry), and Germany has quietly become the third-largest grower of Pinot Noir on earth, which here goes by Spätburgunder. Riesling is still the flagship, there are thirteen wine regions, and the German Wine Route through the Palatinate is where the idea of a scenic wine road began.
Then coffee, which Germans drink more of than beer. The reason it tastes the way it does starts in a Dresden kitchen in 1908, where Melitta Bentz punched holes in the bottom of a brass pot with a nail and lined it with blotting paper out of her son’s school notebook; she registered the design that June and founded a company in December with less than a mark of capital. German coffee deserves a visit of its own.
Where to Actually Eat
A Gasthaus is the default: family-run, regional cooking, no ambition to be anything else. What catches visitors out is warme Küche, the hot-food window, since many kitchens serve from around noon until two, close, and open again in the evening. Turn up at half past three expecting lunch and what you get is cake.
For lunch on the move, skip restaurants altogether. Bakeries do filled rolls all day, and butcher shops with a hot counter put out a midday plate that is cheap, generous, and finished in fifteen minutes. That is where the people who work nearby are eating.
The Bavarian beer garden has one rule that works in your favor, and it pays to understand it precisely. In a traditional beer garden you may bring your own food and eat it at the table while buying only your drinks, which the reasoning behind the state’s 1999 beer garden regulation names as one of the two features defining the form. It does not cover every restaurant with tables outside, so where there is table service and a full menu, the sandwich stays in your bag.
Bring cash, because the old, good places are exactly the ones most likely to shake their head at a card. Tipping is small and spoken: you round up and say the total out loud as you hand the money over, rather than leaving coins on the table.
What ends up on a table in the Palatinate has as much to do with what grows there as with who ruled it, a thread that runs through both German culture and the German regions themselves.
So here is the practical version. Walk past the place with the half-timbered facade and the menu in four languages, go into a bakery at seven in the morning, buy whatever the person ahead of you bought, and eat it standing outside. Then do it again in the next town, because it will be a different roll under a different name, and that is the actual point. ;-)