Tucked away in the far corner of the Bismarck room of the Osteria Italiana is table number eight.
At first glance, perhaps the most striking thing about it is the eclectic array of artwork on display on the restaurant walls behind, including a Beryl Cook print of a waitress juggling champagne bottles and a black and white photograph of rock star Sting with the owner Prisco de Stefano.
There are also several baseball bats resting on coat hooks (‘just for fun’, a regular customer helpfully informs me), and brightly painted ceramics lining a shelf.
So far, so harmlessly quirky. But it was this table in the cosy, wood-panelled, parquet-floored eatery that was Adolf Hitler’s favourite – and is likely to have been where Unity Mitford joined him on numerous occasions.
In light of the discovery of the anti-Semitic aristocrat’s diaries that chronicle their encounters, I followed in her footsteps to this restaurant in Munich – though unlike her, I most certainly wasn’t angling for a dictatorial Nazi suitor.
Osteria Italiana, on the corner of a nondescript street, does not look anything special from the outside.
Apart from a fake bunch of grapes suspended above the front door and a few fairy lights in the windows, you might even say its stucco-decorated facade in the neo-classical style looks a little tired.
Inside however, it has an old-fashioned charm all of its own, with some features dating back to its opening in 1890. Back then it was called Osteria Bavaria – and was one of the first Italian restaurants in Germany.
Adolf Hitler with Franz von Pfefferin and Unity Mitford, who spent days going to his favourite restaurant hoping he would notice her, in 1936
It was still called that in the 1930s when Unity began her nauseating quest to meet Hitler by going to the restaurant every day hoping he would notice her.
Her wish was granted on February 9, 1935, when the upper-class 20-year-old was finally rewarded with an invitation to join him at his table – which she recorded in her diary as ‘the most wonderful day of my life’. After later meetings, she gushed about how ‘very sweet and gay’ the Fuhrer was.
Waiters and staff at the restaurant have grown used to requests from tourists wanting to sit at ‘Hitler’s favourite table’. When I made the same request soon after opening at noon on Friday, they politely sat me at the infamous table No 8.
Mr de Stefano, 63, who has owned the restaurant for 27 years, even comes over for a chat. ‘Yes, this is the table Hitler liked. It’s in a corner and you can see the door so he could see if people were coming and make sure everything was under control,’ he says.
‘Some people come from abroad and only come here because they want to sit at that table. It’s a bit crazy. But most of our customers are from Munich. They don’t talk about Hitler. We have Jewish customers too.’
He adds plaintively: ‘I would far rather people talk about how good the food and wine is here.’ The restaurant first earned the affections of Hitler – an on-and-off vegetarian – when he was living in Munich in the late 1920s and early 1930. It was the venue for his regular ‘stammtisch’ meetings with political friends where they would discuss how to ‘rescue’ Germany.
He also wooed Eva Braun here, having first encountered her in 1929 when he was 40 and she 17. She worked in a camera shop run by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, a short way down the road.
In the course of our trip to Munich, photographer Murray Sanders and I also visited an apartment block a ten-minute walk away in Agnesstrasse where Unity had a flat – after Hitler arranged to have it seized from a Jewish couple.
Prisco de Stefano, owner of the Osteria Italiana, previously known as the Osteria Bavaria
David Wilkes dines at ‘Hitler’s favourite table’, tucked away in a corner of the restaurant
Mr de Stefano says Hitler reportedly enjoyed the spinach soup and diplomatic cakes with cream and cherries that were on the menu
No one there knew which of the ten flats used to be hers. We also went to the sprawling Englischer Garten, Munich’s largest park through which Unity strolled with her SS lovers – and where she shot herself, sitting on a bench.
Mr de Stefano, originally from Salerno in south-western Italy, worked all over the world, including stints at the Savoy Hotel in London, on cruise ships and in top-end kitchens in Switzerland and Paris before buying the restaurant.
He says he was attracted to it because of his interest in wine (there are currently some 16,000 bottles in its labyrinthine cellar) and the restaurant’s largely untouched period charm.
‘The decor is like going back in time,’ he says. ‘It’s been kept old. There are murals from 1890 in another area.’
He recalls an elderly patron who remembered the ‘Mitford woman’ who wanted to meet Hitler. ‘And there was an old man – also dead now – who used to talk about how, when Hitler came in, other customers had to leave so it was only him and his friends there.’
As for the Fuhrer’s favourites on the menu, Mr de Stefano says: ‘I’m told he liked a spinach soup they did here and diplomatic cakes with cream and cherries.’
He shows me a visitor’s book signed by, among others, German tennis ace Steffi Graf. Other well-known visitors have included Monica Lewinsky, and Boris Becker is said to be particularly fond of dining in the restaurant’s courtyard garden.
I am initially the only diner in the Bismarck room (so named because a large portrait of Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s 19th century ‘Iron Chancellor’, once hung on its walls) but later a regular, Ernst Runge, 78, a real estate manager, takes a seat at his usual table, No 5.
‘I’ve been coming here for lunch every day 20 years,’ he says. ‘I like the white table cloths and that they treat me so nicely.’
Mr Runge, who recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with wife Ursula, added: ‘I don’t think about the Hitler connection. There aren’t many restaurants in Munich with this certain, old-fashioned atmosphere. And the food is always good.’
I plump for a main course of a ravioli with parmesan in balsamic and walnuts (£25) followed by tiramisu (£11). Murray goes for tagliolini with black truffle and quail eggs (£28) then a dark chocolate mousse (£11).
As delicious as our lunch is, there is something a little eerie about taking a genocidal maniac’s favourite spot – and imagining the anti-Semitic poison traded across the table between him and the besotted British debutante so desperate to worship at his feet.
