Wagyu vegetables from Tegyu beef – where do you get that? Or miso mushroom soup and hamburger bao? Or Bavarian Pho? You can already guess that this is crossover cuisine, more precisely: a mix of Bavarian and Asian cuisine. You can find them in the Glockenbachviertel since the beginning of February, in the Ciao Chang restaurant.
As is well known, the past two years have been quite difficult. Because Munich had to do without a Bavarian Japanese. The Nomiya, place of work of the traditional Bavarian innkeeper Ferdl Schuster at Wörthstrasse 7, had its lease terminated after 24 years. And due to the first corona lockdown in mid-March 2020, there was not even an opportunity to say goodbye to this very idiosyncratic mixture of sushi, beer, country music and yakitori skewers. A Vietnamese named Co Thao is now playing on the premises.
No Bavarian Japanese – that shouldn’t stay that way, thought Dúc Nguyen, 42, himself the scion of a (different) Vietnamese family that runs three restaurants in Munich: Koriander, Jaadin Grillhouse and “Enter The Dragon”. When he then heard that the restaurant “Beim Franz” was available on Holzstraße in the Glockenbach district, he took the plunge. Together with his partner and chef Daniel Wäcker, 36, who co-founded the Italian coffee bar “Junge Römer” around the corner, they took over the restaurant, which can best be described as “upscale Boazn”. The Löwenbräu restaurant has existed since 1873. In almost 150 years she has seen a lot; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, and Freddie Mercury also left traces that can still be seen today. Most recently, “Beim Franz” was essentially purely a beer restaurant, but the schnitzel is said to have been impeccable.
“Poor Knights” become “Poor Samurai”
Now it’s carved out, but there are creative reinventions with regional Bavarian products. The tofu comes from Erding, the miso from the Black Forest, and the Wagyu beef grazed on Lake Tegernsee during its lifetime. Originally, the Ciao Chang – “the name says it all”, according to Dúc Nguyen – was supposed to present Mediterranean-Asian cuisine. “But the tavern is still in every pore.” And Wäcker adds: “I was in Japan for a while and that’s how I know the izakayas, the inns there.”
Of course: none of this is meant to be deadly serious, and so the “poor knights” as a dessert made with apple, miso caramel and sour cream become the “poor samurai” on the menu. “We tend to move around playfully in space,” says Wäcker. This is also to be taken literally, the tavern decoration consists of cherry blossom branches, Japanese film posters, origami swallows hand-folded by Nguyen’s sister and other pretty accessories. As in Japan, the beer is served from iced glasses, and the wines from German wine-growing regions are of high quality. Incidentally, the Ciao Chang emblem is a winged Japanese waving cat, “so it’s also a kind of wolpertinger,” says Nguyen and grins.
Holzstraße 41, open daily except Mondays from 5.30 p.m. to midnight.