My hotel in Munich is right next to Theresienwiese, an open-air park that is the official grounds for Oktoberfest. A couple of months late for that festival, I have to settle for Tollwood, a Winter Festival taking place on the same grounds.
Stop reading right now if you hold the least bit of respect for my dietary willpower.
The day started with a small breakfast of sliced meat, cheese, bread and some fruit. I was too busy to eat lunch which was a shame because our office has a private chef who apparently is pretty good. The smells wafting through the hallway testified to that claim, but I simply couldn’t take the time to eat.
One of the guys I was meeting with suggested I go to Tollwood after work as a good place to eat some traditional German food and maybe shop for some gifts. Since I hadn’t yet had any real German food this sounded like a good idea.
I walked around the park for awhile scoping the place out until I visited what looked like the most popular stand of the festival. It turned out their speciality was Fueurzangbowle, which I believe literally translates to “fire bowl.” The drink takes the traditional Christmas mulled wine up a notch - adding rum and amaretto. The mug the drink is served in has a lip that looks like a sippy cup or certain commodes and on the lip they put a sugar cube, soak it in some more rum and light it on fire. You are supposed to wait until the sugar gets all caramelized before you start drinking the drink.
Yowza, were they good. I could tell right away I should have eaten something first but I jumped right in anyway. Then later I went back for another. Merry Christmas!
As for food, I ate the following:
A bratwurst in a small bun. Actually, I ended up having one for dessert later - it was that good.
3 kartoffelpuffer with applesauce. These are simple German latkes. One would have been enough, but the smallest serving was 3.
Something that looked like deep fried flat-bread soaked in garlic (which they call knoblauch). Really tasty. After I had walked around the corner still eating it a German woman came up to me saying something excitedly in German which I took to be “oh mein gott, where can I get me some of that?” and I managed to get her going in the right direction without saying a word, which was good since I don’t speak hardly a word of German.
A bowl of schinkennudeln, which is flat noodles, ham, onion, garlic and some sort of herb all fried up over an open flame so that some of the ham and noodles are a little crunchy. I’ll definitely be trying to make this one at home. Just smaller servings. Their servings are HUGE!
Was that it? I think it was. I was going to get a crepe but after watching them being made for awhile I decided it couldn’t be as good as the fresh crepes I had in Paris, so I didn’t want to ruin the night by eating something I was disappointed in. Which is how I ended up eating a bratwurst for dessert.
I missed Oktoberfest but the Winter Festival was fun too. I just hope I don’t pay for it when I weigh in this Sunday.
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