The Best Places to Eat and Drink in Lehel & around

Up a steep wooden staircase inside Munich's oldest town house, Tohru Nakamura's tasting-menu restaurant earns its three Michelin stars by doing something harder than fusion: making French and Japanese cooking feel like they were always the same thing. Koshihikari rice with regional trout caviar, a beurre blanc fermented with sake and elderflower. The kitchen tour that opens the meal sets the tone: nothing here is an afterthought.

1. Michelin Guide 3 Stars
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

The dining room sits on the first floor of Dallmayr, Munich's storied delicatessen, reached through the bar and up a staircase that feels like a deliberate threshold. This is a two Michelin star fine dining destination where the chef weaves French and Nordic technique through unmistakably Bavarian instincts across long, multi-course menus. The chefs come out to explain each dish, which makes the whole thing feel more like a conversation than a performance.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Stars
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Axel Vervoordt dressed the room in chic grey and left it tastefully spare, which is a polite way of saying it feels like a gallery that learned to cook. This two-Michelin-starred fine dining room inside Hotel Bayerischer Hof runs a set menu under Kevin Romes, who arrives with a serious résumé from some well-regarded European kitchens. The young floor team works the room with an ease that makes the whole production feel less ceremonial than you might expect.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Stars
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Floor-to-ceiling windows in a triangular room look down on Munich's old town, with the Frauenkirche just around the corner. This is a Michelin-starred modern French restaurant where dishes arrive as a set menu or à la carte, the kitchen balancing temperatures and textures with quiet precision. The wine list runs past 600 labels and the floor team knows it cold, which takes some pressure off the choosing.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name does not lie: tartare in several forms, meat, fish, and vegetarian, anchors the menu at this brasserie tucked into the ground floor of a heritage-protected chancery near Marienplatz. The room has the warm, unhurried feel of a good European brasserie, and when the weather cooperates, the sheltered courtyard pulls everyone outside. The à la carte menu is built for sharing, and the wine list is long enough that asking for help is genuinely the right call.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Tables on the pedestrian terrace fill up fast at this sleek, contemporary dining room a short walk from the Viktualienmarkt. Classic European cooking with a modern lean is the idea, think braised veal shoulder or sole shared between two. The room inside is calm and well-dressed, with art on the walls that actually earns its place. A solid choice when Munich asks you to sit down properly for dinner.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A ceramic piece by Angelika Maria Stiegler catches your eye before the open kitchen does, which is a good trick for a hotel brasserie. This is the dining room of the Rosewood Munich, doing Alpine-inflected fare in a chic, unhurried space, with Wiener schnitzel as a permanent fixture and a lunch menu that changes daily. The Theatinerstraße is steps away, so the after-shopping crowd fills the room at noon.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A French bistro crossed with a New York steakhouse, right in the center of Munich, where the tables are packed tight and the room runs loud and warm. The kitchen skips the plating theatrics and puts everything into the cooking itself, which lands as precise and unfussy. The NY-style fillet with maître d'hôtel butter is the move. Book ahead; the locals already know.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The white-uniformed front-of-house team is a clue that this ground-floor restaurant and bar sits inside one of Munich's great old delicatessens. The menu swings from oysters and caviar to Bavarian ribeye, which is either pleasingly eclectic or a reflection of having very good suppliers next door. Tables are close, the room is lively, and the bar handles pre-dinner drinks with equal seriousness.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Royal blue walls give this small Italian restaurant a quietly nautical mood, which is either an odd choice for landlocked Bavaria or a deliberate act of defiance. It sits steps from Marienplatz and has been around forever, the kind of neighbourhood fixture that earns regulars through house-made pasta and a serious Italian wine list rather than novelty. The lunch set draws a crowd, and the terrace fills fast when Munich finally gets some sun.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A soaring glass conservatory designed by Belgian art dealer Axel Vervoord sets the tone: this is a hotel restaurant that takes itself seriously without being insufferable about it. Inside the Grand Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the kitchen turns out contemporary European cooking, moving between beef tartare and grilled flank steak with the confidence of a place that doesn't need to prove anything. Remarkably quiet for central Munich, which in itself is almost worth the reservation.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Pan-Asian dining room in Munich where the menu drifts fluently between Chinese, Japanese, and European influences without losing its footing. The room is spare and calm, the kind of minimalism that costs money to pull off. Regulars who never need the menu fill the seats most nights. You can work through a tasting menu or order à la carte, and the handmade dim sum tends to be the thing people mention afterward.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Dark wood and warm light set a sleek, grown-up tone at this contemporary Japanese restaurant on Wittelsbacherplatz. The menu moves across sushi, robata-grilled meats and fish, and vegetable dishes with a modern edge. An upstairs bar adds a loungey layer for the evening, and the terrace fills fast when Munich actually delivers on summer.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A bar stocking more than 320 gins is either a very serious gin bar or a steakhouse that knows its priorities, and Little London is the latter. The room mixes exposed wood and a kind of transplanted English-club ease, and the main event is high-grade beef, Black Angus and Wagyu among them, off a Montague grill. Over 250 wines back it up. Near the Isartor, and cheerful enough to fill a private lounge without anyone feeling herded.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The rooftop terrace with its summer views over Munich is a nice bonus, but Nobu Matsuhisa's restaurant inside the Mandarin Oriental earns its keep year-round. It's a sleek, minimalist Japanese-Peruvian dining room where sushi and sashimi share the menu with black cod and Peruvian anticucho skewers, everything designed for sharing. The kind of place where the bill arrives in a leather folder and nobody flinches.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Ali Güngörmüs, a familiar face from German TV, named this sleek Mediterranean restaurant after his hometown in southeastern Turkey, and the menu follows a similar logic, pulling from the Levant while leaning on classical French technique. Expect a set-menu format, a few courses in, with a vegetarian option for the table herbivores. The wine list digs into Turkish producers worth knowing. On warm days, the terrace, tucked inside the Fünf Höfe courtyard, is where you want to be.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Fine dining inside the Vier Jahreszeiten on Maximilianstraße, with its own street entrance so you can pretend you're not walking into a luxury hotel. The room is sleek and modern, the kind of elegant that doesn't make you sit up straight. The chef pulls from regional ingredients alongside imports, weaving them into dishes that feel personal rather than performed. The Tagesbar next door runs the same kitchen if you'd rather keep it casual.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

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.

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide