bavarianbistro.com is a plain-English guide to Bavarian food, Bavarian beer, Oktoberfest and travel in Bavaria, written for readers in the United States and Canada. It explains what a Maß is, why the Weißwurst skin comes off, which beer hall is worth your one evening, what the dirndl bow means, whether Dachau needs a guide and how to see Regensburg by train. Every number and every dated fact on the site is cited to the page it came from, and the sources are listed at the bottom of each article.
The site is not affiliated with the City of Munich, the Oktoberfest, any brewery, tent, tour operator or retailer.
The name, and the food trailer
The Bavarian Bistro was a German food trailer in Austin, Texas, opened in the summer of 2010 by the chef Achim Thiemermann, known to everyone as Chef Keem, and a few friends. It served Bratwurst, Wiener Schnitzel, Leberkäse and sauerkraut to people who mostly had never met a Leberkäse before, and it closed before the year was out. Chef Keem wrote the recipe and food-fact posts that started this site, and when he retired he gave the domain to the person who now runs it. His recipes are still here, credited to him and rewritten with his blessing.
Who writes it
Resi Zauber is the pen name of the site’s editor: a Northern Light, as Bavarians call people from the north of Germany, who lived in Munich for many years and wrote one of the most-read English-language Oktoberfest guides of the early web, a page that ran from 2007 until the platform it lived on closed in 2014. This site is what that guide should have grown into. Resi is a name, not a second person, and the portrait beside her notes is a stock photograph, since the editor prefers to stay behind the name. Everything under it is written by the editor, with the help of AI research and writing tools as the editorial policy explains, and every article is checked against its cited sources by a person before it is published. What the site knows about Bavaria comes from living there and from the sources; what it says about a specific price, date or opening hour comes only from the sources, checked on the date given in the article.
The site does not publish restaurant reviews or first-person trip reports. It has not eaten in every beer hall it describes, and it says so.
How the site is researched
Sources are preferred in this order: the City of Munich and oktoberfest.de, the Bavarian state’s own registers and agencies, the breweries, tents, palaces and museums for their own facts, the EU register for protected food names, the German weather service for climate, the transit operators for fares and times, and only then established publishers for their own reporting. Wikipedia is never a cited source.
Date-sensitive details such as beer prices, festival dates, ticket prices and opening hours are stated with the date they were checked and re-checked before each Oktoberfest and each Christmas-market season. If a fact on this site is wrong or out of date, use the contact page and it will be corrected.
How the site makes money
bavarianbistro.com earns commissions from some links to tours, hotels and products, and shows advertising. Those links never influence what is recommended, and articles say so where they appear. Details are on the affiliate disclosure page.
Who publishes it
bavarianbistro.com is published by Webhaus LLC, 2108 N St, Ste 4030, Sacramento, CA 95816.