World Travel Guide Search for a City   Destination Guides > Europe & Russia > Europe > Germany Germany •  Germany •  Where And When To Go •  Red Tape And Visas •  Costs, Money And Banks •  Getting Around •  Eating •  Drinking •  Communications •  Festivals And Public Holidays •  Gay Germany •  Best Of •  Books •  Explore Germany GERMANY - EATING Germany    view all cities Top Destinations •  Berlin •  Frankfurt am Main •  Munich (München) German food is, as a rule, both good value and of high quality. However, it does help if you share the national penchant for solid, fatty food accompanied by compensatingly healthy fresh vegetables and salad. The pig is the staple element of the German menu - it's prepared in umpteen different ways, and just about every part of it is eaten. It also forms the main ingredient for sausages, which are not only the most popular snack, but are regarded as serious culinary fare - in Bavaria, there are even specialized Wurstküchen (sausage kitchens) which have gained Michelin ratings.   Breakfast The vast majority of German hotels and guesthouses, and all youth hostels, include breakfast in the price of their accommodation. Although some places go in for the spartan French affair of rolls, jam and coffee, the normal German breakfast lies midway between this and the elaborate Scandinavian-style cold table, but the latter is catching on, particularly in middle- and upper-range hotels. Typically, you'll be offered a small platter of cold meats (usually sausage-based) and cheeses , along with a selection of marmalades, jams and honey. Muesli or another cereal is sometimes included as well. You're generally given a variety of breads , which are among the most distinctive features of German cuisine. Both brown and white rolls are popular; these are often given a bit of zap by the addition of a condiment, such as caraway, coriander, poppy or sesame seeds. The rich-tasting black rye bread, known as Pumpernickel, is a particular national favourite, as is the salted Brezel, which tastes nothing like any foreign imitation. Coffee (which is normally freshly brewed) is the usual accompaniment. Drinking chocolate is a common alternative, as are both herbal and plain tea . Tea is served black, often with optional lemon, but does not blend well with German milk. Fruit juice - almost invariably orange - is sometimes included as well. If breakfast isn't included in your accommodation costs, you can usually do quite well by going to a local baker's shop , which generally opens from 7am, if not before. Most chain bakeries have an area set aside for breakfast, known as a Stehcafé (standing café), a practice taken up by some family establishments as well. The coffee and chocolate on offer tend to be of high quality, and there's the added bonus of being able to choose from the freshly made bakery on display; DM5-6/?2.50-3 should cover an adequate breakfast. Snacks and fast food Just as the English have their morning and afternoon tea, so the Germans have Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cakes). Though the elegant type of café serving a choice of espresso, capuccino and mocha to the accompaniment of cream cakes, pastries or handmade chocolates is indelibly associated with Austria, it's every bit as popular an institution in Germany. This hardly constitutes a cheap snack but is unlikely to be a rip-off - except in the most obvious tourist traps. An almost equally ubiquitous institution is the ice-cream parlour ( Eiscafé ). Almost invariably, these are run by Italian émigrés and offer a huge range of flavours and concoctions to choose from, which can either be eaten on the premises or taken away. More substantial food is available from butchers' shops . Even in rural areas, you can generally choose from a variety of freshly roasted meats to make up a hot sandwich. It's also worth going to the open-air markets which are held anything from once to six times a week in the central square of most towns. With a bit of judicious shopping round the stalls, you should be able to make up an irresistible picnic for a modest outlay. Larger cities tend to have a daily indoor version of this, known as the Markthalle . The easiest option for a quick snack, however, is to head for the ubiquitous Imbiss stands and shops. In the latter you have the option of eating in or taking away; the price is the same. These indigenous types of snack bar tend to serve a range of sausages, plus meatballs, hamburgers and chips; the better ones have soups, schnitzels, chops and salads as well. Spit-roasted chicken is usually recommendable and very cheap, at around DM5-6/?2.50-3 for half a bird. Mustard is usually available at no extra cost with all dishes, whereas small supplements are often levied for mayonnaise or ketchup. Most Imbiss places sell beer, but as many are unlicensed you may be forbidden from consuming it on the premises. Among the fast-food chains , Kochlöffel stands out for cleanliness and good food. The speciality here is spit-roasted chicken; prices compare very favourably with the many American-owned hamburger joints. Another chain with decent food is Wienerwald, but its menu, set-up and price structure are more comparable to a restaurant than a snack bar. The Bavarian butcher's chain Vincenz Murr sells full main courses to be eaten on your feet, costing DM5-12/?2.50-6; many smaller concerns throughout the country offer a similar service. Virtually the only places outside northern Germany where you can regularly find salt-water fish are the shops of theNordsee chain. These vary a lot in size and hence choice, and the pre-prepared dishes for consumption on the premises seldom look as appetising as the fish sold for cooking at home. Nonetheless, they are reliable choices for a quick lunch. By far the most innovative and original chain is that run by the Swiss company Mövenpick under the Restaurant Marché logo. Here, fresh market ingredients are the watchwords, whether in the enormous cold buffet selection from which you help yourself, or in the hot grill dishes cooked to order before your eyes. Because of the sheer scale of each operation, they're only to be found in the centres of major cities. Ethnic snack bars are predominantly Italian, Greek or Turkish. The pizzerias are a major boon if you're on a tight budget. Either taking away or eating standing up, prices start at around DM5/?2.50 for a simple tomato and cheese pizza. Most pizzerias also serve pasta dishes, though these are usually less of a bargain. As always, the kebab houses adapt their technique to suit the national taste. The Gyros or Döner is based on real lamb meat and fat and served in bread, generally with tsatziki as a sauce, and costs DM4-6/2-3. Meals and restaurants All restaurants display their menus and prices by the door, as well as their Ruhetag , the day they are closed. Hot meals are usually served throughout the day, but certainly where it says durchgehend warme Küche . The Gaststätte, Gasthaus, Gasthof, Brauhaus or Wirtschaft establishments, which are the nearest equivalents to old-fashioned English inns, mostly belong to a brewery and function as social meeting points, drinking havens and cheap restaurants combined. Their style of cuisine is known as gutbürgerliche Küche ; this resembles hearty German home cooking (hence the comparatively low prices), and portions are almost invariably generous. Most of these places have a hard core of regular customers who sit at tables marked Stammtisch ; unless invited to do so, it's not the done thing to sit there. However, don't be surprised if you're expected to share your table with strangers - in all but the poshest of restaurants, customers are often asked to give up free seats at their table at busy times. The bulk of the menu is the same all day long, though some establishments offer two- or three-course lunches at a bargain price. Standards are amazingly high: you're far less likely to be served a dud meal in any German restaurant than in almost any other country. Starters tend to be fairly unsophisticated - either a salad, pâté or cold meat dish, or, more commonly, soup. Choice for soup is fairly restricted, and tends to be based on an adaptation of foreign fare; prices are usually in the range of DM4-8/2-4. Among the most popular are Gulaschsuppe , a liquidized version of the staple Magyar dish (despite often being dignified as "Ungarische", it's not something a Hungarian would recognize); Bohnensuppe , which is often quite spicy, and derived from the Serbian model; and Zwiebelsuppe , which is a direct copy of the famous French brown-onion soup, usually with floating cheese and croutons. In east Germany, you'll also find Soljanka , a spicy Ukrainian soup with sliced sausages. More authentically German are the clear soups with dumplings, of which the Bavarian Leberknödelsuppe is the best known. Main courses in all German restaurants are overwhelmingly based on pork . As a rule, this is of noticeably higher quality than in Britain, and the variety in taste wrought by using different sauces (it's quite common to find a choice of up to twenty different types) and unexpected parts of the animal means that the predominance of the pig is far less tedious than might be supposed. As an alternative to the ubiquitous Schnitzel, try Schweinehaxe or Eisbein , respectively the grilled (or roasted) and boiled versions of pig's knuckles. Sausages regularly feature on the menu, with distinct regional varieties. Whereas a main-course pork-based dish is likely to cost DM20/10 or less, one with beef will cost a fair bit more. As is the case with snack bars, chicken dishes are comparatively cheap. Many restaurants have a game menu, with more exotic poultry such as duck or goose, along with venison, rabbit and hare; prices then tend to be DM25/12.50 or more. Outside northern Germany, where a wide variety of newly caught salt-water fish is readily available, you'll probably have to be content with fresh-water varieties if you want to eat fish - except in June and July, when restaurants all over the country offer special menus featuring young herring ( Matjes ). Trout is by far the most popular fresh-water fish, though there's obviously a greater choice in places close to lakes and rivers. Where salt-water fish is generally available, the unfamiliar rosefish ( Rotbarsch ) - similar in taste to whiting - is generally the most reliable. Oddlyenough, you're far more likely to encounter a choice of fresh fish in east Germany, where there remain many privatized survivors from the long-established Gastmahl des Meeres chain. The main-course price invariably includes vegetables . Potatoes are usually sautéed, puréed or made into a cold salad. Boiled potatoes, often garnished with parsley, are increasingly popular, but baking, mashing and oven-roasting find little favour. Dumplings made from potatoes and flour are a common alternative. Cabbage is the other popular accompaniment - the green variety is pickled as Sauerkraut , whereas the red is normally cooked with apple as Apfelrotkohl . Salads of lettuce, cucumber, beetroot, carrots and gherkins are often included as a side-dish. From April to late June, when asparagus is in season, many restaurants have a special menu ( Spargelkarte ) of dishes - both vegetarian and carnivore - with this vegetable as a key ingredient. The noodles known as Spätzle and Maultaschen are a distinctive component of Swabian cuisine, occasionally adopted elsewhere. Because so many Germans go to cafés for their daily helping of cakes, desserts in restaurants are an anticlimax, where they exist at all. The Bavarian Dampfnudel is one of the few distinctive dishes; otherwise there's just the usual selection of fresh and stewed fruits, cheeses and ice creams. Germany has a wide variety of ethnic restaurants . The density of these is very much in line with the general Gastarbeiter influx, and there's a heavy southern European bias. Of these, the Italian are generally the best; there are also plenty offering Balkan, Greek and Turkish cuisines. Chinese restaurants are also ubiquitous and usually very consistent, with most offering good-value set lunches. On the other hand, Indian and Thai food is often toned down, largely because few Germans care for hot spices. Vegetarian food Vegetarians will find Germany less than ideal - most menus are almost exclusively for carnivores, and even an innocent-sounding item like tomato soup might have small chunks of bacon floating around in it. However, it's usually easy enough to find such staples as salads, omelettes, pancakes, pasta and pizzas. Most cities also tend to have at least one specialist vegetarian and wholefood restaurant, and these are listed throughout the Guide . Many have self-service buffets where you pay for the items chosen according to their weight. Ich bin Vegetarier I am a vegetarian Haben Sie etwas ohne Fleisch? Do you have anything without meat?