Düsseldorf
The best restaurant in Düsseldorf is that of the Park Hotel on the Corneliusplatz. It is one of the best on the Rhine, and was opened in April 1902 on the occasion of the Düsseldorf Exhibition; it is a fine building, and has pretty grounds and ornamental water adjoining it. It is frequented by the highest German nobility, but yet its prices are moderate.
Luncheons are served at 3 marks, dinners at 5 marks. Suppers for 3 marks are served at prix fixe, or one can order à la carte. The Moselle wines are exceptionally good. There is an American bar in the hotel. The restaurant, handsomely decorated in the style of Louis XIV., is opposite the Opera House and overlooks the Hofgärten.
It has no specialities in the way of food beyond the usual German and French dishes.
At the Thürnagel Restaurant, also in the Corneliusplatz, you are likely to find the artistic colony in session. The restaurant dates back to the year 1858. There is a good collection of wine in the cellars, and a word may be said in favour of its cookery.
The Rhine Valley
The Rhine valley is not a happy hunting ground for the gourmet. Cologne has its picturesque Gurzenich in which is a restaurant; its inhabitants eat their oysters in the saloon in the Kleine Bugenstrasse, part of a restaurant there; and there are restaurants in the Marienburg and in the Stadt garden, and the Flora and Zoological Gardens. At every little town on either bank there are one or more taverns with a view where the usual atrocities which pass as food in provincial Germany are to be obtained, good beer, and generally excellent wine made from the vineyards on the mountain side. Now and again some restaurant-keeper has a little pool of fresh water in front of his house, and one can select one's particular fish to be cooked for breakfast. The wines of the district are far better than its food.
Rudesheim, Geisenheim, Schloss Johannisberg, the Steinberg Abbey above Hattenheim, are of course household words, and the man who said that travelling along the Rhine was like reading a restaurant wine-list had some justification for his Philistine speech. One does not expect to discover the real Steinberg Cabinet in a village inn, and the Johannisberg generally found in every hotel in Rhineland is a very inferior wine to that of the Schloss, and is grown in the vineyards round Dorf Johannisberg. I have memories of excellent bottles of wine at the Ress at Hattenheim, and at the Engel at Erbach; but the fact that I was making a walking tour may have added to the delight of the draughts. The Marcobrunn vineyards lie between Hattenheim and Erbach. The Hôtel Victoria at Bingen has its own vineyards and makes a capital wine; and in the valley of the river below Bingen almost every little town and hill—Lorch, Boppard, Horcheim, and the Kreuzberg—has its own particular brand, generally excellent. Assmanhausen, which gives such an excellent red wine, is on the opposite bank to Bingen and a little below it. The Rhine boats have a very good assortment of wines on board, but it is wise to run the finger a little way down the list before ordering your bottle, for the very cheapest wines on the Rhine are, as is usual in all countries, of the thinnest description. Most of the British doctors on the Continent make the greater part of their living by attending their fellow-countrymen who drink everywhere anything that is given them free, and who hold that the vin du pays must be drinkable because it is the wine of the country. Our compatriots often swallow the throat-cutting stuff which the farm labourers and stable hands drink, sooner than pay a little extra money for the sound wine of the district. The foreigner who came to Great Britain and drank our cheapest ale and rawest whisky would go away with a poor impression of the liquors of our country. Drink the wine of the district where they make good wine, but do not grudge the extra shilling which makes all the difference in quality. The dinners and lunches on the big express Rhine steamers are a scramble for food; but on some of the smaller and slower boats, where the caterer has fewer passengers to feed, the meals are often very good. I have a kindly memory of an old head steward, a fatherly old gentleman in a silk cap shaped somewhat like an accordion, who provided the meals on a leisurely steamer which pottered up the Rhine, stopping at every village. He gave us local delicacies, took an interest in our appetites, and his cookery, though distinctively German, was also very good. In a land where all the big hotels fill once a day and empty once a day, and where the meals are in heavy-handed imitation of bourgeois French cookery, that old man with his stews and roasts, and pickles, veal, and pork, sausages big and sausages small, strange cheeses, and Delikatessen of all kinds was a good man to meet.
German "Cure" Places
First of course amongst the places in Germany where men and women mend their constitutions and enjoy themselves at the same time comes