Hopfen und Malz Gott Erhalts's

Sooner or later in Munich, you're going to encounter some stunningly rude "service". Britain's service culture sometimes leaves a lot to be desired, but I've never had "Yeah? What. Do. YOU. Want?" barked at me in a pub here, as I have many times in Muenchen. The blokes in charge of the barrels in the beergardens are the worst, as if angrily dispensing short measures gives them some sort of exhalted status. Restaurants and bars are usually better. The older waitresses often have a carefully-cultivated brusqueness, which along with the dirndl is all part of the act. It's a characteristic also found in Blackpool landladies and East End matriarchs.

Refreshingly, the service has always been reliably good at Andechser Am Dom - It's an outlet of the eponymous Bavarian abbey, and very, very good it is too. The staff are young, friendly and they actually smile. The restaurant is owned by Sepp Kratz, a Munich bigwig who also owns the Hippodrom at Oktoberfest, and who last year (in)famously refused Michael Jackson's dad Joe entry to the tent. Kratz is also the image of Odilo Lechner, the recently-retired abbot of Andechs, which leads to a bit of confusion when looking at the photos of the proprietor and his famous (Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger) chums on the wall.


The Dom's food is excellent - all of it from Andechs organic farms - and the beer's even better, brewed by monks at their monastery overlooking Ammersee. The abbey is well worth a visit, an hour or so trundle to the the end of S-Bahn 5 at Herrsching, and a wander through the woods and fields until you see the Kloster itself, looking exactly as it does on their logo. Your reward for the climb is the Andechs beer garden, which if you've got there at a weekend will be ferociously busy. I'm a sucker for the deliciously crisp and pure Andechs Helles, and I just wish it was easier to find in the UK.

Warning: A post-beer walk back to the station in the 9/10ths blackness of the woods is a good way to fall down a hole and lose some very expensive sunglasses.

Helles and Back

There's nowhere like the Hofbrauhaus. Normally, I'm hardwired to avoid tourist traps but I love a night at Munich's - if not the world's - most famous pub. It's such a ludicrous place that's it's impossible not to enjoy a visit, and often so busy that you're forced to take pot luck where you might sit, getting forced into drunken mateship with a coachload of Koreans, a snuff-taking, corpulent farmer in full Lederhosen, a group of St Pauli fans or even 8 Dutch nuns. Even the band parping out schlager sounds good after a couple of litres. I don't begrudge paying the thick-end of ten quid for a mass of HB helles, thankful that it's not the Paulanerhaus or the Lowenbrauhaus, two Munich brewers where cost-cutting following takeovers has become very evident in the taste of their beers (or in Paulaner's case, total lack of taste).

HB also run the city's most famous biergarten, the Chinese Tower in the Englischer Garten, (home also to probably the world's drunkest oompah band and definitely the rudest serving staff) and just outside the city centre my old local, the Hofbraukeller. The HBK is in leafy Haidhausen, a ten-minute tram ride up the hill. Visitors don't often seem to make it here, which is a shame. They'd find an echt Muenchner bierkeller, one of the city's best biergartens and some of the better examples of traditional Bavarian food, served up by the usual harridan-with-a-heart waitress.


Haidhausen is also home to Unionsbrau, the nearest thing the town has to a craft brewer, who produce a sublime unfiltered Kellerbier Hell, poured direct from the wood. "Sliyhtly sour, tangy, zesty with a dri ornagey finishh" I tipsily recorded on my mobile on our visit last week. Unionsbrau is a brand of Lowenbrau (and so by extension InBev) but don't let that put you off.

One unavoidable aspect of Munich's beerhalls is the faint whiff of the city's dark past. Hitler gave some of his early speeches at the Hofbraukeller, and kicked off the Bierkeller Putsch from the long-gone Burgerbraukeller just round the corner. The Festsalle where he did some of his most strident rabble rousing is still on the upper floor of the HofBrauhaus.

Incredibly, when I first visited the HbH some eleven years ago, there were still swastikas on the ceiling - which, it must be pointed out were added after the war when the HbH was rebuilt. On recent visits I noticed that these worrying (and not to mention illegal) symbols have at last been changed into waving Bavarian flags. Only took 'em 65 years.