Nürnberg Restaurants

Barfüßer is quite a popular beer-hall, brewery and restaurant in Nürnberg and when I entered it order to take a few pictures, my lense immediately got covered by foggy condense-water, as it was so cold outside and rather hot inside.
I really would have prefered to be able toshow you some pics of the great atmosphere - maybe I can do that next time.
This is normally the place, where I have a beer, when I make a stop-over in Nürnberg and spend the night in my motorhome close to the trainstation.

Favorite Dish: They brew their own beer and I really like it very much and I normally have some Nürnberger Rostbratwürste, a spicy sort of small sausages, that you may buy under that name all over germany and Austria, BUT of course they taste best in Nürnberg !!

The menu is not really polynesian but rather an asian-fusion mix (tasty), but the ambience is very nice and inspired by South Pacific and South-East-Asian cultural influences. The Kon-Tiki cocktail menu has my absolute recommendation.

Favorite Dish: mixed starter platter !

Oh my word, I love kartoffelpuffe!!!

To those who have not yet been fortunate enough to have been initiated in this delicacy, kartoffelpuffe are potato pancakes. Robust and rustic first cousins to the Swiss rosti, they are made of grated potato and are fried in oil to produce a piping hot, crispy golden taste of heaven.

Kartoffelpuffe are traditionally served with apple sauce in a typically German combination of flavours. I am generally unimpressed by the prospect of combining fruit with savoury food, and so I prefer mine plain with just a sprinkle of salt, or (German culinary purists should now look away and skip to the next paragraph for fear of being offended) dipped in tomato ketchup!

Kartoffelpuffe are the ideal street food if you're attending Christkindlmarkt, when they not only provide scrumptious ballast in preparation for a happy evening's sampling of the local brew, but also have the added virtue of warming frozen fingers back to life! Just beware of those drips of piping hot oil!!!

The German capacity to devour cake is matched only perhaps by their southern cousins in Austria, and 'kafe und kuchen' (coffee and cake) is a national institution that is best described as almost a religious observance.

This all comes as somewhat of a mystery to me, as - given the choice - I would always opt for something savoury (see my tip on my love affair with kartoffelpuffe above), but as I have married into a family of unrepentent sweet toothivores, I have come to realise that the larger, the sweeter and the creamier the cake, the better!

Like other German towns, Nuernberg offers a bewildering selection of cakes in cafes and from market stalls. My small son was particularly taken by the geometry of these particular cakes, whose rounded form and similarity to aspects of the female form led him to refer to them as 'Boobie cakes' (hence the smirk!)

Lebkuchen could well be my favourite biscuits in the whole world. There is never a bad time of the year to eat a lebkuchen, but I am particularly fond of them over the festive season, when their spicy gingerbreadiness and snow white icing seem the very embodiment of Christmas spirit.

There is something very medieval about lebkuchen's combination of flavours, and I suspect that the recipe has remained largely unchanged since the Middle Ages. The combination of ginger, cinnamon, cloves and other spices epitomises the taste of the age, which provided the incentive for enterprising merchants to venture far afield in search of spice-rich fragrant East. In other words, without lebkuchen, the New World might never have been discovered ... ;)

But enough of spuriously interpreting social history, and on with the discussion at hand. The range of lebkuchen on offer at the Christkindlmarkt is absolutely bewildering and irresistable to both eye and stomach. I am used to plain white or chocolate-coated lebkuchen (the latter constituting cultural Bolshevism in my book), and it was quite a revelation to see highly coloured variations on a theme in the form of Father Christmases, winter scenes and almost every other charming Christmas cliche imaginable. Elsewhere in the Children's Christmas Market, it is even possible for children to decorate their own lebkuchen (see my tip under "Things to Do').

If you are visiting Christkindlmarkt, a selection of these biscuits would make a perfect gift to bring home with you - which of course presupposes that you have the self-descipline to resist their charms en route!

1 more image

I put these two reviews together because, quite frankly, you could sit at an outside table in either Browns or the Black Bean...they are directly opposite each other on Ludwigsplatz and their outside tables are intermingled.

But I had my first Nurnburg drink (a looong Weissbier and very, very welcome!) at Browns. And also had several coffees and apfelschorlen there on a very hot evening, just to rehydrate myself after a long day's wandering.

They serve all types of drinks, of course, and cakes and snacks and ice-creams.

Both cafes were always crowded, so I assume that local people (there were plenty using them) consider them to be of a good standard and reasonable price.

I certainly did.

And having a fountain nearby was nice too! :-)

This sophisticated restaurant is recommended by everyone from hotels to Conde Nast Traveller magazine to Yahoo. The exterior, featuring large etched glass picture windows allows visualization of the interior - well lit, decorated in pale colors, with a large and impressive modern bar, Da Claudio seems very appealing and draws a well-dressed and well-heeled clientele. The neatly cloth covered tables are set in advance. One need dress up a little for the occasion.
The menu offers a mix of northern and southern specialties, not large but with enough for everyone to find one good choice. The servers are smooth and coordinated and made us feel welcome as well.
The website suggests an open display for a the antipasto and specials reflecting daily purchases. Neither of these were apparent to us, however, as no specials were offered and only the desserts were on display. Prices were high - with beer, not wine, we spent about $80 US here.

The food offerings were surprisingly bland = the best word that comes to mind is dull. We hoped for a bit more sophistication in preparation. There was enough to eat but just not enough to excite especially at these prices. Ambience is not everything.

Favorite Dish: Linguine in a marinara sauce with seafood contained an abundance of marine life, most of it fresh, and was the only dish we sampled with any verve at all. For the squeamish, do note that the shrimps do come with heads attached here.

When we arrived to the restaurant, we were pleasantly surprised with the ambience and were ready for a nice evening out. However, things don't always run the way you'd like. The servers were very disoriented, took the orders in a wrong way and carried out the dishes separately. So, I finished my main course when some other people had to wait another 15 minutes to get theirs. Not to mention that they forgot to bring me (and some other people) salads that we had ordered. Situations like that happen and you hope that the manager would do something about it. However, the restaurant's manager didn't see anything wrong with the situation. He didn't even excuse himself and told our party that we had been the rudest people ever. Not a very good night out.. the worst I can think of in lovely Nürnberg.

Favorite Dish: The food wasn't very tasty, especially for the high prices they were offering them.