Munich: beyond the beer festival

“You guys should have been here last week,” said the taxi driver whizzing our all-male party from the airport towards our hotel in Munich city centre.

It was the week after the climax of Oktoberfest, the Bavarian festival of booze which has ’em flocking in from all over Europe. This year’s had been a biggie as well, by all accounts, as revellers celebrated the event’s 200th anniversary by downing around 7m litres of beer. What’s not to like about that?

Well, quite a bit actually. I’d visited Oktoberfest a few years earlier with a pal and hated it.

The sheer number of people – particularly at weekends – makes the site a daunting prospect, particularly when you have to push your way onto the platform just to get out of the underground Metro station. And if you’re not fortunate enough to be pre-booked onto a table in one of the vast drinking halls dotted around the site you can face a very long wait for a beer.

So much so that when we finally did get into one of the halls one day, we stayed there so long that when we left again we were much worse for wear. One of our party (alright, it was me) then had an embarrassing fall which led to them being retrieved from the bottom of an escalator by a kindly old Bavarian gentleman.

Thankfully, things were much more civilised this time around and I got to discover Munich is a much nicer place away from Oktoberfest.

We stayed at the fabulous Mandarin Oriental Hotel just off Maximilianstraße – a long boulevard containing many of the city’s priciest boutiques. This 70-bed, five-star hotel (right) is the smallest in the hotel group’s portfolio, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in spectacle. At the time of our visit, its rooftop terrace was being transformed into a ski chalet – offering a pop-up Bavarian restaurant just for the Christmas and New Year period.

The 360-degree view from the rooftop also gave a good indicator of the scale of the city. Munich is only Germany’s third-largest city, but it feels like a proper European seat of power, complete with palaces, theatres, huge public squares and buildings of a grandeur that you simply don’t experience in many of England’s provincial cities.

The Deutsches Museum, for instance, is a huge, sprawling science and technology complex at the edge of the city’s English Gardens. It contains more than 28,000 exhibits telling the history of subjects ranging from textiles to space travel. You could walk around it for a day and still feel you haven’t done it justice.

For those who prefer their exhibits to be a little less worthy, there’s also a new BMW World out of town in the city’s old Olympic park. The locals seem very proud of it but since I’m not the world’s biggest car buff I gave it a miss. I was quite relieved when a travelling companion returned with the following three-word review – “glorified car showroom”.

Missing the festival didn’t mean that we missed out on the authentic German drinking experience, though. The city’s big brewers such as Löwenbräu, Spatenbrau, Augustiner and Hofbräu all have their own beer halls.

We tried the carvernous Hofbräuhaus, which has all of the things you might expect to see in a German beer hall. There are the servers in traditional Bavarian dirndl dresses offering pretzels and pork knuckles, and you can swing your Stein along to the obligatory ‘ooompah’ band. The place was busy even in the early evenings, and was frequented by a lively mix of locals of all ages and a large tourist crowd.

The city centre also has a broad variety of other bars and clubs, though, and during our brief weekend visit we found time to sample a lovely budget Mexican (Sausalito), an atmospheric American cocktail bar with a nightly live jazz pianist (Schumann’s) and several slightly cooler hangouts filled with hip young Bavarians drinking and dancing the night away. To borrow a line from Billy Connolly, they made a happy man feel very old.

Getting there: We travelled from Manchester to Munich with Singapore Airlines, which has daily flights from its European hub based in the city. Prices (including taxes and surcharges) start from £210.20 for economy and £493.40.for business class.