This Marienplatz café sits inside a branch of Hugendubel, the German bookstore chain that has traded since 1893 and remains family-run five generations later. Alongside books, it offers coffee, reading areas, and tolino e-readers.
Best for Coffee, books and reading nooks at Marienplatz
This Marienplatz café operates inside a branch of Hugendubel, the German bookstore chain founded in 1893 and still, more than 130 years later, run by the same family — currently siblings Nina and Maximilian Hugendubel in its fifth generation. The company operates more than 100 branches across Germany with roughly 1,600 employees, selling books, eBooks, audiobooks, toys, calendars, stationery, and film alongside its tolino e-readers. That last detail is a real distinguishing fact rather than a footnote: Hugendubel co-founded the tolino alliance, a shared German digital-reading platform the company describes as internationally unique, giving customers access to more than three million eBook titles through a device sold at its own counters. The Marienplatz café slots into that broader identity as the pause button on a bookstore visit — a coffee and a reading area inside a business built, at its core, on getting people to sit down with a book rather than browse and leave. It's not a standalone specialty roaster chasing single-origin lots; it's a café attached to one of Germany's oldest and largest family booksellers, where the draw is the shelves as much as the cup, and where the till behind the counter is backed by a company old enough to have outlasted most of its original competitors twice over.
Munich's grand café since 1888 runs a proper confiserie shop — house pralines, Baumkuchen and the Luitpold blends — from the salon where the city has taken its coffee for over a century.
Best for Pralines, Baumkuchen and classic Munich café confectionery
Café Luitpold opened on Brienner Strasse on 1 January 1888, part of a redevelopment of seven buildings between Brienner Strasse and Salvatorplatz undertaken between 1886 and 1888. Architect Otto Lasne built it around a large domed hall and a mirrored salon connected by a colonnaded passage, finished in bronze and black marble with ornamental wall paintings — a scale that let it rival Vienna's Café Central and Budapest's Café New York. It quickly became one of Munich's central gathering points for nobility, merchants, artists and ordinary citizens; Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee are reported to have founded the Blue Rider artist group there in 1911, and comedian Loriot was a regular in the 1960s, later writing an essay about the café's pralines. The building was 80 percent destroyed in 1944 and reopened in simplified form as a Palmengarten in 1948. Today's café and confiserie, renovated in 2010, sells house-made cakes, pastries, biscuits and pralines, and still runs the Luitpold coffee blends the address has served for over a century. A small first-floor museum displays photographs and documents from the building's history.
A Dresden chocolate house near the Frauenkirche that curates bean-to-bar bars from chocolatiers worldwide and makes its own pralines and truffles. Several Schokoladenkontore, a chocolate café and a small chocolate museum sit across the old town.
Best for Curated bean-to-bar chocolate and pralines
Fridolin Knösel opened this old-town café in 1863 and created the Heidelberger Studentenkuß, a chocolate praline of nougat, truffle and hazelnut once passed discreetly between courting students. The shop on Haspelgasse near the Heiliggeistkirche still makes the pralines by hand several times a week and sells them alongside the café.
Best for The original Studentenkuß chocolate praline
Rischart, Munich's family Backerei-Konditorei "Munchner Genuss seit 1883", baking Brezn, Brot, Kuchen and seasonal specialities like Zwetschgenzeit across its own city cafes. First-party door live with history, quality and product pages.
Best for Breads, pretzels, cakes and seasonal pastries
Visit official site ↗
Visit official site ↗
Visit official site ↗
Visit official site ↗
Visit official site ↗