Let’s be beastly to the Germans. No, for a change, let’s not. That country has its virtues. Beer and the celebration of beer – think Oktoberfest – are two of them. A third is the widespread availability of native dishes which – if not elegant – are both solid and cheap.
Judging on all of the above criteria, it’s difficult not raise a foaming Stein to this newcomer near Moorfields Eye Hospital. It claims to be the UK’s first Bavarian restaurant, and certainly struck this reviewer – who spent a summer in Germany a few years ago – as strikingly authentic. The staff are the real McCoy, and this is one of the few places in town you can peruse the Süddeutsche Zeitung (should you be so minded).
The house beer is Paulaner – a brew that’s not hugely marketed here – and the other options includes a deep-brown ‘visitor’ from Cologne (Kölsch). (Wines – specified as ‘red’ or ‘white’, at £19.50 a bottle – do not especially encourage investigation.)
The menu comes complete with all those wonderful specialities which visitors to Germany sometimes seem to find it hard to embrace. Indeed, even I shamefully opted out of the great snack dish Leberkäse (literally liver-cheese), choosing instead a Münchener Schweinshaxe – a huge and meaty knuckle of pork, complete with the potato dumplings and Sauerkraut I never learned to love (even in the Fatherland itself). The meat was nicely cooked, but the highlight of my lunch was a rich pancake with apples.
The setting – a plain whitewashed basement, with a few trestle tables – is understated, arguably to a fault. But, for an establishment just north of the City, this is remarkably like the sort of stand-by destination you might expect to find in any small German town.
