Tohru in der Schreiberei

In 1552, this building housed the city's official record office — the Schreiberei, where Munich's history was formally committed to paper. In 2020, Tohru Nakamura chose it to house something equally considered: a restaurant that would attempt to reconcile three culinary traditions into a single, coherent voice. Within three months of opening, Michelin awarded two stars. In 2025, the third arrived. Munich now has its first three-star restaurant since the original Tantris era.

Nakamura was born in Munich in 1983 to a Japanese father and a German mother. He carries both inheritances with the precision of someone who has spent a career thinking about what they mean. His previous restaurant, Werneckhof, held two Michelin stars and established him as Germany's most distinctive young chef. The move to the Schreiberei, a sixteenth-century structure in the old town whose exposed stone walls and low ceilings give the room an intimate gravity no modern build could replicate, was a statement of the highest ambition.

The tasting menu runs to eight or ten courses, depending on the appetite and occasion. Koshihikari rice — the most prized Japanese variety — arrives with regional Bavarian trout caviar and a breath of wasabi, tied together with a beurre blanc made from fermented rice, sake, and elderflower. The logic is French in structure, Japanese in restraint, Bavarian in sourcing. No dish announces its influences. Each simply arrives at a conclusion that feels inevitable.

The wine list is overseen with comparable intelligence, favouring German and Austrian producers alongside selections that illuminate rather than compete with the food. Service is warm, unhurried, and conspicuously knowledgeable — the kind of hospitality that makes you feel the evening was designed for you specifically, even in a room of forty covers.

Getting a table requires planning. Three to four months for weekday dinners; longer for weekends and special occasions. The waiting list exists because people want to return, and because word has reached well beyond Germany. This is now a destination restaurant in the fullest sense — people build trips around it.

A proposal should happen somewhere that will be remembered without effort — where the memory of the room, the food, the evening is sharp enough that the occasion is permanently set in that context. Tohru in der Schreiberei is that room. The sixteenth-century stone walls and candlelit intimacy of the dining room create a setting of genuine historical weight. There are no bad tables. Every seat commands the room equally.

For an occasion of this significance, the kitchen can be informed in advance. The team's approach to private moments is discretion itself — a champagne service timed with precision, a course adjusted to mark the moment, zero theatricality that upstages the event. They have done this before, many times, and understand exactly what is required. The ten-course menu provides three hours of pacing that never rushes and never lags. Time at this table passes differently.

"The trout caviar and rice dish alone justifies the journey. You understand within the first course what three stars mean here. Nothing is showing off. Everything is essential." — S.P., Special occasion

"We flew to Munich for dinner here and felt no need for justification. When a restaurant earns three Michelin stars in five years, in a sixteenth-century building, you simply go." — L.M., Destination dinner

"The proposal dinner. She said yes before the second course. The room did half the work." — F.K., Proposal dinner