Food

Mainkai Café, Frankfurt – Great value meals with a view of the Main

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Ranking roughly #20 out of 2,000 Frankfurt restaurants on Tripadvisor (including a Certificate of Excellence until 2018), Mainkai Café had been recommended to me on various occasions. So I was very pleased, when I was invited to bring a friend and check out their food. Located next to Frankfurt’s beautifully re-built Old Town on the riverbank of the Main, the big windows of the tiny Café offer good views. My friend had already arrived when I rocked up a few minutes late. The interior is basic but friendly. After short deliberation my buddy went for kofta with couscous and salad (€11.90) while I ordered venison goulash with Schupfnudeln (a type of freshly made thick noodles made of potatoes, flour and eggs), red cabbage, and cranberry jam (€14.50). Both dishes arrived after just ten minutes, and even before they arrived on our table, we could tell from the lovely smells that […]

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Food

Moriki – Japanese in Frankfurt – our Restaurant Review

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I tried out Frankfurt’s posh Japanese (on the ground floor of the Deutsche Bank towers) today. They have a lunch deal for €19 which includes miso soup, beef skewer, and a side salad with rice. I arrived at Moriki just before noon, so was among the first few guests on the vast premises. The space is pleasantly lit, warm wooden colours mixed with a few glass and steel designer elements and some art. Service was friendly and quick. I was seated next to the sushi bar, where I could watch the staff prepare sashimi.    It happens only rarely that a miso soup makes you go wow, especially with some of the chains like Pret having consistently worked for years to bring the standard down. However, this was a fine specimen of a miso soup, thick and full of flavour, with little bits floating around in it. I also enjoyed […]

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Food

Fleming’s Brasserie & Wine Bar, Frankfurt

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When I relocated to Frankfurt for a consultancy assignment in my day job half a year ago, I was looking for a nice place close to the office where I could use free WiFi and have a quick dinner in a pleasant atmosphere after work, and that’s how I stumbled across Fleming’s Brasserie and Wine Bar, Hamburger Allee, in Bockenheim, five minutes by tram from the city centre and central station, close to the congress centre and trade fair. Fleming’s is a Frankfurt hotel chain (roughly 20 hotels cum restaurant here and in other cities such as Munich and Vienna), and the Barbarians do not like chains. However, for what it’s worth, this is one of the better chains. I’ve never stayed at any of their hotels, but have used a couple of their restaurants in various cities for business meetings (for work, not to impress), because they are affordable […]

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Restaurant Lohninger, Frankfurt

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A few days ago, my wife, Ms B, and I had just returned to London respectively Frankfurt from lovely Vienna, I decided that I needed a distinctly Viennese culinary booster to get me over the dark days and cheer me up. Mario Lohninger’s eponymous restaurant on the south bank of the river, which is also known as Museumsufer (museum riverbank, because of the large number of nearby museums), just two minutes’ walk from Sachsenhausen’s “Schweizer Platz”, has been receiving sterling reviews ever since it opened in 2010. Initially considering a career as a pro downhill skier, he helped out from a very early age in his grandparents’ bakery and his parents’ restaurant in Leogang near Zell am See. It would seem likely that my parents and several uncles and aunts, who went together on skiing holidays to Leogang every single year for more than a decade before I was born, […]

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Food

Black Bulls, Frankfurt, our Restaurant Review

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The Barbarians are usually no great fans of steak houses. We’ve been to too many of them that take the label too literal and completely lack any imagination or cooking skill beyond the preparation of cows’ meat. However, the further North you get in Germany, the more steak houses there are, and Frankfurt is already sufficiently North for there to be plenty. Besides, we had heard very good things about Black Bulls and we immediately liked the fact that they don’t blindly focus on steak, but are also known for their finesse in preparing seafood.   For starters I opted for 12 Black Bulls Style Escargots with herb garlic butter gratin (€12.90), a mistake. The bread and butter served before the starter arrived, looked so unattractive I couldn’t be bothered to try it. The extremely tiny “Achat snails” were completely overpowered by the rich, creamy butter, which did not taste […]

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