Why it belongs in ORBIS
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.
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.