Salt, Beer and Pretzels: A Food Lover's Walk Through Munich's Old Town

From an innkeeper who outvoted a prince to monks' beer, the Viktualienmarkt, the salt gate, a royal wheat beer and the city's grandest cake counter

Munich · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Karlstor & the Stachus: A Square Named After an Innkeeper

Karlsplatz, 80335 München, Germany

Stand under the Karlstor, the old city gate with its two stout round towers, and turn to face the traffic, the trams and the big fountain splashing on the square behind you. Every Münchner you meet will call this place the Stachus... and very few of them will tell you that the name belongs to an innkeeper.

On the map it is Karlsplatz, named in 1797 after the Elector Karl Theodor. He came from the Palatinate, he never really loved Munich, and Munich never loved him back... he even explored a plan to swap Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands. So the people quietly ignored his name. Instead they kept calling the square after a tavern that stood out here in the eighteenth century, run by a man called Eustachius Föderl. Stachus is simply the Bavarian short form of Eustachius.

Think about that for a moment. A prince gives the square his name, and a man who poured beer wins the argument, more than two hundred years later. If you want one sentence that explains this city, that is it: in Munich, the inn usually outlasts the throne.

The gate itself is far older than both of them. It was built in the fourteenth century as the Neuhauser Tor, the western gate of the second city wall, and only took Karl Theodor's name in 1791. Through this arch ran the old salt road, the east-west trade route that made Munich rich. Salt came in on carts from the east and left this way towards Augsburg, and every barrel paid the city a toll. Keep that in mind... salt is the first ingredient of this walk.

Before you go through, find the little bronze fountain on the right-hand side of the gate: a naked boy being spat at by a grinning faun. It is the Brunnenbuberl of 1895, and polite Munich society was scandalised by it at the time. Now walk through the arch into Neuhauser Straße, the great shopping street, and look out on the right for a tall gabled facade where the smell of roast pork drifts onto the pavement.
2. Augustiner Stammhaus: Munich's Oldest Brewery Name

Neuhauser Straße 27, 80331 München, Germany

Stop in front of the tall facade with the painted gable and the deep arched doorway, and take a breath through the door. That warm smell of crackling pork, malt and wood is the Augustiner Stammhaus, the home tavern of the brewery that most Münchner, if you push them, will name as their favourite.

The story begins with monks. In 1328 the Augustinian friars, whose monastery stood a little further east along this very street, are recorded brewing beer, and the Augustiner brewery counts its history from that year. That makes it the oldest of Munich's great brewery names. When Bavaria dissolved the monasteries in 1803, the brewery passed into secular hands, and it has stayed independent ever since. The friars' church is still there, by the way, a few steps away... it now houses the German Hunting and Fishing Museum.

Now for the law every Bavarian brewer still talks about. Munich already had its own beer regulation in 1487. Then in 1516, in Ingolstadt, the Bavarian dukes Wilhelm the Fourth and Ludwig the Tenth decreed that beer could contain only barley, hops and water. Today it is called the Reinheitsgebot, the purity law. Yeast is missing from the list for a simple reason: nobody yet understood what it was. And part of the point was bread... keeping wheat and rye for the bakers rather than the brewers.

The building you see was rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth century, when the brewing itself moved out to a larger site west of the centre. Inside are panelled halls, a courtyard with arcades and a little beer garden squeezed between the shops of one of the busiest pedestrian streets in Germany. Look at the tables: Munich families, office workers, and men in loden jackets who have sat at the same table for decades.

There is one more local legend. Augustiner is famous for doing almost no advertising, and people here like to say that the beer sells itself. Order a Helles and judge for yourself. Then cut south through the narrow lanes of the Hackenviertel to Sendlinger Straße, where a church is squeezed between the houses like a jewel box.
3. Asamkirche: The Private Church of Two Brothers

Sendlinger Straße 32, 80331 München, Germany

Between the shop windows of Sendlinger Straße, a church front is squeezed in like a jewel box forced into a row of ordinary houses: rough painted rocks at its base, and above the door a saint being carried up to heaven by angels. Step inside for a moment, let your eyes adjust... and then look up.

This is St. Johann Nepomuk, which everyone calls the Asamkirche. It was built between 1733 and 1746 by two brothers, Egid Quirin Asam, a sculptor and stucco artist, and Cosmas Damian Asam, a painter. The plot is barely wider than a townhouse, so they built upwards. Down at the pews it is dark and heavy, the earthly world. Your gaze rises through gold, marble and twisting columns towards the light pouring in from the top, the heavenly one. It is less a building than a single total work of art, and it is almost too much... deliberately.

Here is the detail most visitors miss. Egid Quirin lived in the house right next door, and he had a window opened from his home so that he could look straight onto the high altar. A private church, a private view of heaven, without even putting on his shoes.

The people of Munich did not like the idea of a private church on a public street, and the brothers had to open it to everyone. The saint above the door was also a very fresh choice at the time. John of Nepomuk was a priest from Prague, thrown into the Vltava river in 1393, and he had only been made a saint in 1729, a few years before the building started.

Why bring a church onto a food walk? Because Bavaria does not do anything halfway... not its beer, not its sausages, and not its Baroque. This is the same appetite for abundance, carved in stone and stucco. Now walk east through St.-Jakobs-Platz, past the city museum and the new synagogue, and on towards a long hall of iron and glass at the edge of the market.
4. Schrannenhalle: Iron, Glass and Grain

Viktualienmarkt 15, 80331 München, Germany

In front of you stretches a long hall of cast iron and glass, with slender columns and rows of arched windows. It looks more like a small railway station than a market... and that was exactly the fashion of the age that built it.

A Schranne is a grain market. For centuries, Munich's grain was traded in the open on the main square, which was called the Schrannenplatz. Only in 1854 was it renamed Marienplatz, after the column of the Virgin in its centre. When the trade outgrew the square, King Maximilian the Second had a modern hall built here, in the early 1850s, in the same years that London was marvelling at its Crystal Palace of iron and glass.

Grain was never just a commodity. It was bread, and bread was politics. In bad years the price of a sack of grain could decide whether a family ate, and whether a city stayed calm. That is also the quiet logic behind the purity law you heard about at the Augustiner: wheat and rye for bread first, beer second.

And bread brings us to the Brezn, the Bavarian pretzel with its glossy brown skin. Munich tells a lovely legend about it. In 1839, the story goes, a baker at a royal coffee house brushed his pretzels by mistake with the lye used for cleaning instead of sugar water. He baked them anyway, and out came the dark, salty crust we know today. Historians shrug... lye pretzels are probably older. But Munich likes its version, and so will you once you have tried one warm.

The hall itself had a hard twentieth century. Much of it was lost to fire and demolition, and for decades it seemed gone for good. A surviving section of the ironwork was restored and put back up at the start of this century, and today it is a food hall again, which feels like justice. Now walk a few steps east, towards the tall blue-and-white striped pole rising above the market stalls.
5. Viktualienmarkt: The Maypole and Karl Valentin

Viktualienmarkt 3, 80331 München, Germany

Now you are standing in the stomach of Munich. Around you are stalls under striped awnings, pyramids of radishes, white asparagus in spring, wheels of mountain cheese, sausages hanging like curtains, and in the middle a tall maypole painted in blue and white spirals, hung with little carved figures.

The market moved here in 1807, by royal order, because the main square had become far too small for it. Its name comes from the Latin word victualia, provisions. To the north you can see the tower of the Heilig-Geist-Kirche, the church of the old Holy Spirit hospital. In the nineteenth century the hospital buildings were torn down, and the market spread over their grounds and gardens... the sick moved out, the cheese moved in.

Look at the figures on the maypole: they show the trades of the town, brewers, butchers, bakers, dancers. And under the chestnut trees is the market's beer garden, with a very Munich rule. It serves beer from the six big Munich breweries in rotation: Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner and Spaten. Nobody gets to own the market... not even in a glass.

Scattered between the stalls are six fountains honouring Munich's folk singers and comedians. Find the one with a long, thin bronze figure with a big nose: that is Karl Valentin, set up in 1953, the great absurdist comedian whom Bertolt Brecht admired. Someone puts fresh flowers in his hand almost every day. One of his most quoted lines fits this whole city: everything has already been said, just not yet by everyone.

The market women here, the Standlfrauen, are famous for a tongue as sharp as their knives, so do not prod the peaches. And a word about the Weisswurst you will see on every menu. Tradition says you eat it before the noon bells ring, with sweet mustard and a pretzel. Now leave the market heading east, past the stalls, towards the old gate where Munich's fortune first rolled in on salt carts.
6. Isartor: The Gate of Salt

Tal 50, 80331 München, Germany

Ahead of you stands the Isartor: a broad gate with a tall central tower, two round side towers, and a long painted frieze running across its front, full of knights, horses and banners in a triumphal procession.

To understand Munich, you have to understand salt. In the twelfth century, salt from the mines around Reichenhall travelled west on carts towards Augsburg, and whoever controlled the river crossing collected the tolls. The crossing belonged to the bishop of Freising, at Föhring, a little downstream. In 1158 Henry the Lion, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, destroyed that bridge and built his own crossing here, by a settlement of monks. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa confirmed the new market in an arbitration at Augsburg that June, and that document is Munich's birth certificate.

So this city was literally founded on a stolen salt route. The gate came later, in the fourteenth century, as part of the second city wall. The fresco on its front was painted in the 1830s and shows the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian returning in triumph after his victory of 1322. Every salt cart that came to Munich passed under an arch on this spot and rolled up the street behind you, the Tal, towards the market.

Today the towers hold something completely different: the Valentin-Karlstadt-Musäum, dedicated to Karl Valentin and his stage partner Liesl Karlstadt. Yes, Musäum, deliberately misspelled, which tells you everything about its sense of humour. You met Valentin in bronze at the market a few minutes ago. Here you can meet his mind.

Stand still for a moment and imagine the traffic of seven hundred years ago: oxen, carters, toll collectors, the smell of horses and pitch. Salt preserved meat, it made sausage possible, it paid for walls and churches. Now follow the salt carts' route back up the Tal, the broad street leading west, and look out on the right for a house where wheat beer was once a royal secret.
7. Weisses Bräuhaus: When Wheat Beer Belonged to the King

Tal 7, 80331 München, Germany

Here on the Tal, stop in front of the broad old house with the painted lettering, the Weisses Bräuhaus. Through the windows you will see waiters carrying tall, curved glasses of cloudy golden beer with a thick crown of foam, the shape of a vase rather than a mug.

That is Weissbier, wheat beer, and for a long time ordinary Bavarians were not allowed to brew it. Remember the purity law, barley only? Wheat was the exception, and it was a privilege. First a noble family held the right to brew it, and when that family died out at the start of the seventeenth century, Duke Maximilian the First took it for the ruling house. For well over two centuries, wheat beer was a monopoly of the Bavarian rulers, and a very profitable one. Some historians say its income helped Bavaria pay its way through the Thirty Years' War.

By the nineteenth century, though, Bavarians had fallen for dark lager, and wheat beer looked old-fashioned. The crown was happy to let it go. In 1872 a brewer called Georg Schneider bought the right to brew it from King Ludwig the Second and set up in this house. It was a bet on a dying style... and it won. Today Weissbier is one of the great symbols of Bavaria, and the Schneider family still brews it.

The brewery here in the Tal was destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and production moved to Kelheim on the Danube, to an old wheat beer brewery the family had bought earlier. But the tavern stayed, rebuilt, and it is still the place where Munich comes for a Weissbier and a white sausage.

Which brings us to the Weisswurst. Legend says it was invented on a February morning in 1857, in an inn on Marienplatz, by a butcher who ran out of the thin sheep casings for his fried sausages and used thicker pork casings instead... and, afraid they would burst in the pan, simmered them in hot water. The rules are strict: eat it before the noon bells, peel it, or suck it out of its skin, which locals call zuzeln, and never, ever without sweet mustard. Now walk west along the Tal to the end, and bear left towards the old church tower standing above the roofs.
8. Alter Peter: The Church Older Than the City

Rindermarkt 1, 80331 München, Germany

Tilt your head back at the tower of St. Peter, rising above the roofs with its green lantern cap and the narrow gallery running around it. Nobody in Munich calls it St. Peter. It is simply Alter Peter, Old Peter, as if it were a grumpy grandfather of the town.

And that is fair, because Old Peter is older than Munich. This little rise is the Petersbergl, where monks had a settlement before Henry the Lion moved the salt bridge in 1158. The city's very name comes from them: Munichen, at the monks'. That is why the city's coat of arms still shows a small figure in a monk's habit, the Münchner Kindl. The church you see has been rebuilt many times, Romanesque, then Gothic, then Baroque, but it is still the oldest parish of the city.

If your legs are willing, the tower has around three hundred steps up to the gallery. From the top you look straight down onto the striped awnings of the Viktualienmarkt, the town hall towers... and on a clear day with the warm alpine wind called the Föhn, the whole chain of the Alps appears on the horizon, seemingly close enough to touch.

Inside, in a side altar, there is something you will not forget. Behind glass lies the skeleton of Saint Munditia, a Roman martyr, brought to Munich in 1675. Her bones are dressed in gold and covered in jewels, and glass eyes stare out from the skull. Baroque Catholic Bavaria loved these jewelled saints from the catacombs of Rome. Today they unsettle almost everyone.

The little square below is the Rindermarkt, the medieval cattle market, where livestock was bought and sold in the heart of town. The bronze cattle lying around the modern fountain are its memory. At the end of the Second World War the church lay in ruins, and Munich rebuilt it stone by stone over the following decades. Now walk the few steps north to the corner of Marienplatz, and look for the stairs leading down below the town hall.
9. Ratskeller: Dining Beneath the Town Hall

Marienplatz 8, 80331 München, Germany

Find the stairs leading down beneath the neo-Gothic town hall and follow them below the square. Down here the noise of the square disappears, and you walk into a maze of vaulted cellars painted with vines, scrolls and old sayings.

This is the Ratskeller, the town hall cellar. The New Town Hall above it was built in stages between 1867 and 1908, and the cellar restaurant opened in 1874, along with the first section of the building. The idea comes from the old Hanseatic towns of the north, Bremen and Lübeck, where the council kept its wine in the cellar and sold it to citizens. Munich adopted the tradition, but this being Munich, the wine came to share the vaults with beer.

So what do you order down here? Schweinsbraten, roast pork with a crust that crackles, and a Knödel, the great Bavarian dumpling, to soak up the gravy. Or Obatzda, a spread of ripe soft cheese mashed with butter, onion and paprika, which you smear on a pretzel. The story goes that it was invented in the 1920s by a landlady near Freising, to use up cheese that was getting too ripe. Bavarian cooking is like that: generous, practical, and allergic to waste.

There is something charming about eating in the cellar of the city government. Above your head the city council debates budgets and building permits, and below its feet people are toasting each other with steins. And it is the mayor of Munich who opens the Oktoberfest each September, with the cry O'zapft is, it's tapped, a ritual that began in 1950.

When you climb back up, look at the facade of the town hall itself. It is covered with saints, dukes, dragons and gargoyles, and if you search carefully you will find little animals and figures hidden in the stone. It looks medieval, but it is barely older than the telephone. Now walk around the corner into Dienerstraße, where a shop with royal coats of arms has fed Munich's richest households for three centuries.
10. Dallmayr: Three Centuries of Fine Food

Dienerstraße 14, 80331 München, Germany

On Dienerstraße, stop in front of the grand facade with gilded lettering and royal coats of arms above the doors. If the doors open as you pass, you will catch it at once: the smell of fresh coffee, chocolate and smoked fish, all at the same time.

This is Dallmayr, the most famous delicatessen in Munich. Its roots go back to 1700, when a grocer's shop was founded in the town. It took its present name from Alois Dallmayr, who ran it from 1870, and at the end of the nineteenth century it passed to the merchant Anton Randlkofer, who turned it into something much grander. The Randlkofer family's descendants still own it today.

Under them, Dallmayr became a purveyor to the Bavarian royal court, and its reputation spread to courts across Europe. Imagine Munich around 1900: a city of kings, painters and brewers, and here, behind these doors, was the world. Tropical fruit, lobsters, caviar, delicacies that most people in the city had never even seen. Look inside at the coffee counter: the beans are still weighed out from big painted porcelain jars, more like an apothecary than a shop.

Notice the contrast with the place you started this morning. Out at the market, the Standlfrauen sell radishes and sausage to everyone. Here, behind gilded lettering, the same city once bought its luxuries. Munich has always had both stomachs, the plain one and the extravagant one, and it is proud of each.

There is a reason the shop sits on this street. Dienerstraße runs alongside the town hall, a stone's throw from the royal palace, and this quarter was where court officials and wealthy citizens shopped for centuries. Buy a small bag of coffee or a chocolate if you like... it is the cheapest way to feel like a royal supplier's customer. Then walk north, through Theatinerstraße and on towards Brienner Straße, where our last stop is waiting with cake.
11. Café Luitpold: Cake in a Palace

Brienner Straße 11, 80333 München, Germany

On Brienner Straße, step through the door into a long glass counter lined with tortes, tarts and pastries, and behind it a bright hall under a glass roof, with palms and the murmur of a hundred coffee cups.

Café Luitpold opened in 1888, in the newly built Palais Luitpold, and it took its name from the Prince Regent Luitpold, who governed Bavaria after King Ludwig the Second died in 1886. In its golden years it was one of the grandest coffee houses in Europe: column-lined halls, painted ceilings, chandeliers, billiard rooms, newspapers from everywhere.

Munich around 1900 was a capital of art, and painters, writers and musicians filled cafés like this one. Thomas Mann, who lived here for decades, opened one of his early stories with two words that every Münchner knows: München leuchtete, Munich was shining. The story goes that members of the circle which later became the Blue Rider, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and their friends, met at the Luitpold's tables. Imagine it: modern art being argued into existence over strudel.

In 1944, bombs destroyed the palace and the café. After the war it reopened in a much smaller form, and the great halls were gone for good. Its present look, with the glass-roofed palm garden, comes from a modern renovation. Like so much of Munich, it is a careful reconstruction of a memory, and none the worse for that.

So here is where this walk ends: with cake. Think back over the route. Salt rolled in under the Isartor and made a city. Monks brewed beer, dukes made it pure, kings sold off wheat beer, market women defended their radishes, an innkeeper outvoted a prince... and a baker's mistake, if you believe the legend, gave the world a pretzel. In Munich, food is not a side dish to history. It is history. Order a slice of Prinzregententorte, the layered chocolate cake named after Luitpold himself, and let this be your final stop.