The Munich-based Volk-Verlag doesn’t skimp on superlatives. “By far the best cafés in and around Munich,” is the title, and publisher Michael Volk refers to his author as the “biggest coffee aunt in the city.” Both can be accepted under the motto: “Exaggeration makes things clear”. And Diana Hillebrand actually wrote her new book “At Home in the Café – The Guide” not only with a lot of coffee, but also with a lot of love and passion. She found 73 special, small coffee houses, and many of them are truly a discovery that even professionals don’t know about. You can say: the work was worth it.
On Monday evening, the publisher and author presented their “Café Guide” in a handy paperback format and invited people to the Fausto coffee roastery on Birkenleiten in Giesing, together with its owner Klaus Wildmoser. He has been roasting coffee for a good ten years and a few years ago moved here into the former Kraemersche Kunstmühle into beautiful, large rooms that also have space for large roasting machines that extend over two floors. Hillebrand, the roasting master reveals, comes here often because she is at home in the neighborhood. This is one of the reasons why he made his roastery, café and coffee available for the book launch party. Some of the cafés discussed in the book contributed their special delicacies to the buffet, which soon buckled under the weight. And so publisher, author and host Wildmoser certainly won’t have to starve in the next few days.
Publisher Michael Volk, who, according to his own statements, is “usually more at home in a pub than in a café”, was keen to note that his author “did not discover any of the 73 cafés by searching around on the Internet”, but rather worked out everything through personal conversations. Yes, that was the case, confirms the author: “In every district there are small oases that you probably have to find before you find them.” Hillebrand visited them and spoke to the operators, sometimes for an hour and a half or two hours. “It sometimes took quite a long time until the one magical sentence came that expressed the soul of this special café,” as she says herself. And you can actually say: it was very worth it. There are 56 very individual cafés in the city, the remaining 17 between Unterhaching and Huglfing to Garmisch and Moosburg. Such a wide catchment area might not have been necessary; who goes to Markt Indersdorf to have a coffee? Except Ms. Hillebrand, of course.
But stop complaining. The vast majority of the coffee houses that Hillebrand discovered are actually oases of Munich cosiness in the best sense – from the landlady Neslihan Anuk-Erdem’s Nes Coffee on Lindwurmstrasse to the listed 1950s Café Jasmin on Steinheilstrasse to the Cafebar Mona on Monacensia.
Diana Hillebrand: At Home in the Café – The Guide, Volk Verlag, 160 pages, 20 euros