A haven from all the other restaurants in Munich that serve heavier, meatier cuisines, Prinz Myshkin is a welcome find suggested to me by a former colleague, Gregor Hohpe, who I caught up with at dinner. He happens to be German, and vegetarian and so I was happy to go with his first recommendation of this place.
It’s a surprisingly large restaurant made up of two great rooms easily catering to probably about one hundred people. On a Monday night it was reasonably busy though nowhere near full capacity yet. Impressive. On first impressions it wouldn’t be what you’d imagine as a vegetarian restaurant with a long bar stretching almost the entire length of the dining room, showcasing a decadent array of desserts and cakes at one end.
My dining companion was running a little late so I had plenty of time to peruse the menu. Firstly there’s an overwhelming amount of options that span quite a number of cuisines. Everything from Italian, to German adaptations with mock meat and fleeting visits to the far east. These wide variety of options in a normal restaurant concern me as they did here. Normally doing such a wide variety of tastes means that nothing is very spectacular and everything very average. Fortunately I turned out to be wrong for in this case.
We started with a tomato mozzarella sharing plate. A generous serving which I forgot to take a picture of. I ended up ordering the truffle gratin. Strong flavours and a hearty dish to counteract the heavy cold lightly dotted with snow.
To lighten the dish, it came along with a very nicely dressed side salad that had some sort of nut dressing, adding another dimension to the otherwise already umami-rich truffle gratin. A good complement and really tasty.
When we hit desserts, we had a look at the menu and once again, the wide breadth of options made me a bit concerned. Apparently there’s a saying that the you’re not in a true Bavarian restaurant unless their dessert offerings is at least half the size of the main course. From the number of cakes, puddings and desserts, I guess this definitely qualified. I couldn’t really make up my mind. My friend ordered this asian inspired tiramisu, using bright red berries, yuzu cream and layered in a foo-foo glass tier.
Since I was in the heart of Bavaria, I thought I would go with the more classic option of an appel streusel with vanilla ice cream.
Thank goodness the ice cream was proper and none of this weird, pretend vegan stuff. It was a very hearty portion as well, that I ended up leaving a significant amount after having my fill of it. The apple was well cooked, but still firm, studded with lots of spicy and with the appropriate layers of pastry folded as is the way for a streusel from this area (it’s isn’t any apple crumble style here!).
Service was great – not rushed, polite and away from the typical haughty German service infamous in many other restaurants. The waiters did a good job of entertaining my attempts of German and kindly answered only in German. A great find and one I’ll be returning to next time I’m in Munich.
Name: Prinz Myshkin
Website: http://www.prinzmyshkin.com/en
Found at: Hackenstraße 2, 80331 München, Germany