Bratwurst Röslein, Nuremberg

The claim

A Franconian sausage house on the Rathausplatz behind Nuremberg's town hall, with room for 530 inside, a beer garden on the square and an open grill. Its front page says 1493; its own chronology dates a beer-tap house on the site, the Waizenstüblein, to 1431, and the room named after it is still the oldest in the house. The building itself is post-war, the timber-framed one having burned in January 1945.

What the records show

Two dates hang over this house and both are its own. The front page says since 1493, and the chronology behind it dates nothing to that year at all. That chronology opens with old house deeds naming a beer-tap house called the Waizenstüblein in 1431, later taken into the Röslein and still the name of its oldest room, and with the first mention of the Nuremberg sausage kitchen Zu den drei Rosen about 1480. The birthdays the house has kept count from 1431 — a 570th in 2001, a 575th in 2006 — and the English Wikipedia gives 1431 as the founding year. Against that, a Nuremberg local-history site citing Konrad Nopitsch has the sausage kitchen arising as a plain beer house called Zu den drei goldenen Röslein at some point before 1801, and notes that Friedrich Mayer's guide to the city of about 1850 lists it among neither the beer houses nor the sausage kitchens at a time when the Bratwurstglöcklein was famous. The same account has Paul Zettel advertising a Bratwurstküche zu den drei goldenen Röslein in 1904, with the largest sausage production in the city behind it, and the name Bratwurst Röslein settling only after the First World War; the house's own chronology gives 1815 for the first official mention as the Röslein and 1906 for the first as Bratwurst Röslein. So the grade is C: nothing traced reaches the fifteenth century except through the house's account of deeds nobody else has read. The building is young. Bombing destroyed the timber-framed house on 2 January 1945, the Köhnleins carried the trade on in a temporary place after the war, the present building went up between 1965 and 1967, and the butchery next door was taken into the dining room in the 1990s. Drink without a meal is answered by the operator, whose beer-garden page on the Rathausplatz offers cold drinks before it offers food, by the city's tourist office describing the beer garden in the courtyard, and by a card that prices beer by the half-litre, wheat beer and pilsner among them. The register has now been read rather than left unsearched. The Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments publishes its own list for each municipality, and the list for the city of Nuremberg as it stood on 16 September 2026 carries no monument at Rathausplatz 6. What it does list on that square is the town hall, D-5-64-000-1589, entered under Rathausplatz 2 with Fünferplatz 1 and 7 and Theresienstraße 2, and the fountains between the square and the Hauptmarkt: the Schöner Brunnen, D-5-64-000-730, the Gänsemännchen, D-5-64-000-1590, and the Fleischhauerbrunnen, D-5-64-000-726. The house stands inside the Altstadt Nürnberg ensemble, E-5-64-000-1, which takes in the city within its fortifications; an ensemble is drawn round an area, dates no building and judges no single house in it, so it is not a listing of this one. The absence fits the dates, since the timber-framed predecessor burned on 2 January 1945 and what stands now went up between 1965 and 1967. The ensemble entry earns one more line, because it explains why a post-war house sits inside a protected old town at all: the city was rebuilt from 1950 to Heinz Schmeißner and Wilhelm Schlegtendal's plan, which followed the old street lines and the old plot pattern instead of replacing them, and the State Office counts that reconstruction as part of what the ensemble protects.

Dated evidence for Bratwurst Röslein, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1493	Claimed founding	The pub
1815	First record of a drinking house here	Bayerische Denkmalliste

What to look for inside

Its oldest room is the Waizenstube, named after the beer house of 1431 the building took in
The beer garden stands on the Rathausplatz beside the Christkindlesmarkt
Six hundred sausages fit on the grill at once, in an open kitchen

Visiting

Bratwurst Röslein is in Nuremberg, Germany, at Rathausplatz 6, 90403 Nürnberg. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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