The Best Places to Eat and Drink in Germany

A team behind the counter stretching dough rounds by hand tells you everything about the priorities at this Turkish flatbread spot in Gesundbrunnen. Lahmacun comes out fresh to order, topped with ground meat, herbs, and onion, and costs well under two euros apiece, which invites a certain reckless quantity. The chargrilled kebabs in fresh bread with a punishingly tangy garlic sauce pull equal weight. Expect a wait out front; the place is small and not a secret.

The flatbread here is that specific combination of crispy outside and pillowy inside that makes a döner kebab feel like a structural achievement. This counter-serve spot in Schöneberg does chicken döner: tender, well-marinated meat, grilled vegetables, fresh herbs, a hit of lemon, and your choice of garlic or sesame sauce. Locals who know to avoid the tourist queue around the corner fill this place instead, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Dozens of Thai vendors set up under bright umbrellas in a Wilmersdorf park on weekends, April through October, weather permitting. It's an outdoor street market tradition that's been around for decades, drawing people from across the city for homemade noodle soups, curries, and Isan-regional dishes cooked out of home kitchens. A recent relocation shifted things to Württembergische Strasse, just alongside the park, but the format stays the same: bring cash, find a patch of grass, eat well.

Hand-pulled biang biang noodles in the Shaanxi style, wide as a belt and springy enough to make you think twice about every bowl of pasta you've ever eaten. This is a casual noodle shop, so expect a line, a short menu, and a very low bill. The vegan options hold their own alongside the beef. Berlin opened a third location partly so the city could stop queuing quite so dramatically for the first two.

The building has been serving food and drink since the 1600s, which makes the laminated tourist menus feel almost beside the point. Zur letzten Instanz is a classic Berlin tavern in Mitte, all low ceilings and a courtyard garden, with a menu built around pork in its most serious forms. The eisbein, a slow-cooked knuckle, is the thing to order. Charlie Chaplin apparently ate here, which the staff have not forgotten.

A single room so small that on busy nights you simply don't get in, Barroom holds a handful of people at most, which means the lone bartender is close enough to overhear your problems without being asked. It sits east of the Isar, a taxi ride from the rest of the Munich bar circuit, so you're committing to the detour. Cosy is a polite word for it; intimate is more accurate.

The orange-braided flex of the Edison bulbs is strung with a precision that borders on obsessive, which tells you something about the people running this concrete-and-glass cocktail bar in Feldstraße. The industrial look softens in summer when the full glass front folds open and drinkers drift onto the terrace. There's also a cozy backyard for when the street gets loud.

A cocktail bar above Café Einstein where the bartenders wear jacket and tie and seem to shake drinks in rhythm with the mellow jazz on the jukebox. The back bar holds what might be the most gin bottles you've seen in one place, with vodka, whisky, and tequila collections filling the adjoining rooms. The crowd skews older and bookish, the kind that actually reads the spirits menu.

A cocktail bar on a quiet residential street that somehow works as both a pilgrimage site for serious Negroni drinkers and a local hang for people who just want somewhere good to land on a Tuesday. The Campari ambassador who runs it has scaled up with each move, which means more room and a sharper team behind the bar. Order a Negroni, obviously, but nobody's going to stop you from ordering another.

Floor-to-ceiling windows face out onto Weserstraße, one of Neukölln's long, bar-every-other-door streets where someone is always playing music on the pavement. Tier is a cocktail bar done up in hunting-lodge-meets-art-deco, dim-lit and playing old rock, which makes it feel more settled than the DIY living-room spots around it. The neighborhood runs young and restless, and this is where they land when they want an actual bar.

The back bar looks like an apothecary, all premium bottles and small wooden drawers, which sets the tone for what follows. This intimate cocktail bar fits about thirty people under a bronze ceiling with banquette seating along the grey walls, but the right stool at the far end of the bar, where the drinks are actually assembled, is the seat to take. Small, serious, and easy to linger in.

On the banks of the Spree, this Berlin steakhouse has been the city's most reliably glamorous social theatre for as long as anyone can remember. Dry-aged cuts from Germany, the US, and Japanese and Australian Wagyu go under a high-temperature broiler, and the room, all modern art and soft lighting, fills with politicians, artists, and regulars who all pretend not to notice each other. Ranked among the world's top steak restaurants, it earns that company.

Bird of paradise flowers in expensive vases, champagne in trough-sized ice buckets: Bar Amano does not pretend to be a dive. It's a hotel cocktail bar in Mitte with a lengthy list and bartenders happy to skip it entirely if you just tell them what you're drinking these days. The bay windows along the edge of the room are a good perch for watching Auguststraße do its thing.

The hook at Boilerman is the highball, executed with the kind of seriousness that makes you reconsider whether you've ever had one before. This cocktail bar inside the 25 Hours Hotel in HafenCity is the larger, second outpost of a Hamburg original, and it carries the same philosophy: one format, done obsessively well. The waterfront crowd tends toward the effortlessly cool, which is either inspiring or mildly exhausting depending on the night.

Two wire-sculpture monkeys greet you at the bar inside Das Stue Hotel, which backs onto the Tiergarten and is one of the few places in Berlin where the unwritten dress code tilts toward "actual effort." The lobby flows in with its glass cases of wooden animal carvings and shoes, but the bar itself goes clean and spare, all glass walls and open courtyard. Berlin is a relaxed city; this place hasn't gotten the memo, which is exactly the point.

The rococo plaster ceiling alone justifies pushing past the hotel lobby. Falk's Bar is a cocktail bar in the grand European tradition, all gilt mirrors and ornate walls around a central island bar, tucked inside the Bayerischer Hof. The room has a way of making you feel underdressed even when you aren't, so most guests seem to arrive having planned the outfit in advance.

The owner built and decorated the room himself, then showed up in a waistcoat and bow tie to serve cocktails in it, which tells you almost everything about this cocktail bar in Kreuzberg. The space is comfortable rather than grand, with an upright piano at the back that gets used. It occupies an old German kneipe, and the bones of that neighborhood local are still very much present, which only makes the carefully made drinks feel more at home.

A fresco of a woman extending a cocktail with the words "Mon Cheri" covers one wall, and the plastered ceiling carvings look like they took someone's entire back problem to complete. This small cocktail bar near Stuttgarter Platz occupies what was, by local account, a former red-light establishment, though the art nouveau restoration has thoroughly rebranded the premises. Come for the room as much as the drink.

Three gold lampshades hang over the sunken bar like a chandelier that made a sensible decision. This cocktail bar sits tucked into the grand lobby of a five-star Munich institution, past the marble and the hush, in a pocket of red leather armchairs that feels borrowed from a private club. The hotel around it skews old-school and a little formal, but the bar wears that well.

Silver chalices, a swizzle stick on the bar top, and a heavy cigar lighter in the bartender's hand set the tone at this Prenzlauer Berg cocktail bar. Smoking is legal in Berlin, and the team here leans into that with quiet theatrics. The technique behind the bar is precise and unhurried, the kind you watch without meaning to. A small, considered room where the drinks are taken seriously and the flourishes earn their place.

Dark wood and candlelight fill a handsome corner building near the River Isar, and Pacific Times takes the brief seriously. It's a cocktail bar with a long spirits list that notes, charmingly, whether each bottle came from a pot still or a continuous one. Classics are stirred or shaken as they should be, draught beer rounds out the options, and the whole operation shares DNA with the sister bar Barista down the road.

Tiffany lamps, glitter balls, and oil paintings share wall space with mounted boxes of trinkets, and somehow the whole mishmash holds together. Salut! is a neighbourhood bar on a Schöneberg street where graffitied apartment blocks meet boutique storefronts. Silent retro film clips play on the wall behind the bar, VW Beetles and bell-bottomed couples, scored only by whatever's on the stereo. The kind of place that feels like it's always been there.

A former greengrocer's shop turned cocktail bar, Saphire now trades in brushed stainless steel and low-slung cream banquettes rather than root vegetables. The menu runs deep through classics, but the house specialty called Züchtigungsphantasien, which translates loosely as "disciplinarian fantasies," is what most people end up ordering. It's a berry mojito situation, which is either reassuring or a mild anticlimax depending on what you were expecting.

A granite bar the size of a small continent anchors this cocktail bar tucked around an internal courtyard in a townhouse that gives nothing away from the street. The room runs dark leather and dim light, and the menu leans into what it calls "restorative" drinks, fizzes and long pours served in bulbous wine glasses. The bleak façade is almost the point, keeping out anyone who needs a sign to find it.

Bamboo walls, puffer fish hanging from a matted rush ceiling, and hand-carved tiki poles set the mood before you've even ordered. This basement tiki cocktail bar beneath the Hotel Bayerischer Hof is the Munich outpost of the long-running global chain, which means an oversized illustrated drinks menu and tan leather banquette seating that makes the whole thing feel pleasantly, deliberately out of time.

The narrow room runs almost wall to wall with bar counter, lined with leather stools and framed by booth seating at each end. Victoria is a sleek cocktail bar on Potsdamer Strasse, a stretch that doesn't exactly telegraph "upmarket lounge," which may be why the crowd that found it feels faintly proprietary about the place. Dark wood panels, modern art, low light, the general sense that someone thought hard about this.

Named for the Buñuel film where dinner guests find themselves mysteriously unable to leave, this Kreuzberg neighborhood bar operates on exactly the same principle. You go for one drink. You stay for several, helped along by the fact that the Italian restaurant next door will send food over. Nobody seems to mind being stuck in the cul-de-sac off Oranienplatz. That's rather the point.

A red velvet curtain parts and you're suddenly in a dimly lit, jazz-soaked room with clay walls hung in black-and-white photos of the man himself. Gainsbourg is a cocktail bar named after Serge, styled as an "American" bar but feeling more like a Paris side street, which suits the namesake just fine. The hedge-lined terrace works on a warm night, but the real pull is the moody interior.

Prints of all 43 U.S. presidents line the walls, a nod to the straw polls the Paris Harry's ran during American elections. This cocktail bar inside the Grand Hotel Esplanade leans hard into the Parisian original, borrowing the dancing flies logo and the college pennants behind the bar. It has all the right props and none of the patina, which is the unavoidable fate of a 1988 replica trying to out-charm a place that opened before World War One.

A wall of squashed Coca-Cola cans, arranged with a precision that suggests someone had strong feelings about recycling, sets the tone at this Friedrichshain cocktail bar. The curved ceiling follows the line of the bar counter below, bare brick runs to the back of the room, and the whole place manages to look deliberately rough without trying too hard. The drinks, despite the edgy trappings, lean toward the classics.

Leaded windows and collegiate crests on wood-panelled walls give this old-school cocktail bar a look borrowed, quite literally, from Harry's Bar Paris, which is exactly where it started. Been around forever by Munich standards, with a jazz pianist in the basement and a members-only cigar room upstairs. The kind of place where the bartender has probably been pouring longer than most of the clientele has been alive.