Looking up at the hotel
Munich has been waiting over 11 years for another luxury hotel – and on 25 February 2019 Andaz Munich Schwabinger Tor opened its doors. This is a 274-room property that is part of a new community, the village of Schwabinger Tor conceived and overseen by realtor Maximilian Hurler and his family. There are separate blocks, two – joined by a fifth floor airbridge – for the hotel, one for offices and one holds 150 apartments, for rent rather than sale so the Hurlers can control them. And in between the buildings are roads, for pedestrians, for cycling, running and walking, and for farmers’ markets to offer their wares.
The main atrium
It is all very clever, though it must be said that Concrete’s interiors may not be to everyone’s taste. The open atrium, with its coloured lucite restraining walls, do hint of brutalism meets industrialization. That having been said, rooms have been magnificently fitted out, by GM Mattheos Georgiou and his team, with everything the intelligent global traveller might need. As the video shows, I had copies of Forbes (German) and Monocle (English), four self-diagnosis books from The School of Life and a box of quiz cards, from Ridley’s Games Room, Brain Freeze quiz. An A3 brochure explained some of the fittings Concrete have put in, including the apparently covetable, but to me confusing, light and blind controls (Berker Series 193).
Bastian Baumann
This is a hotel that has two continent-wide highlights. One is the 13th floor rooftop bar, M’Uniqo, which moves down 37 steps to the double-height 12th floor if indoor socialising is preferable. Rooftop minders start controlling elevator access, down on the ground floor, ready for the 5 p.m. start, seven days a week, and though groups come and go, from post-work through to cocktails, drinks-and-tapas, and on to post-prandial socializers and the midnight crowd. I joined nearly 200 others watching the sunset – I had a Villa Massa Limoncello with Belvedere vodka, which I called Bastian after my date, Bastian Baumann, the hotel’s head of sales and marketing. M’Uniqo is a marketing magnet: at least 20% of hotel guests come up here, he said, and the rooftop experience definitely attracts rooms business, especially at weekends.
Butters selection
The other highlight at this memorable luxury hotel is the ground floor Lonely Broccoli restaurant. Why the name? Well, this is a modern meat emporium and vegetables might feel ignored…. we entered through a glass wall holding over 100 different butchery cleavers, each jammed into a wood block. We went past the open kitchen and through the indoor space, out to a pedestrian road, where we sat at an unadorned wood table watching evening strollers. Dinner was sensational: a German Pinot Noir, Josten&Klein 2015 Glanzstück, from just south of Bonn, addictive broccoli-flavoured cream cheese to go with home-made sourdough, burrata with fennel and orange, and a perfect ribeye – my knife was a hefty wood-handled Hepp. And in the morning, after a good work-out in the 24/7 airy Technogym, I was back at TLB (The Lonely Broccoli). Its buffet is healthy (avocado smoothie) through to calorific (Farmer’s Breakfast, eggs, Bavarian sausage, roast potatoes, green beans – and make your own nut paste machine) and, for dairy gourmets, look at its range of butters. WANT TO SEE SUITE 451?
