Address - Tokyo-to, Chiyoda-ku, Kanda Surugadai 3-1 Opening hours - Open Mon to Sat from 11:30 am to 11:30 pm Map - Yes Telephone - 5283-6846 Menu - In Japanese and English CC - OK

Strategically placed in the gentlemen's toilet, a magazine article proclaims, among other things, that Franziskaner, a restaurant serving "international cuisine" (I always assumed German restaurants would serve German food: how naive of me), is looking for cooks: experience in the Italian and French cuisines as important as that in the German one.

 In that sentence you have in a nutshell the situation. Whatever food there is, it's mostly Italian and French, of a quality and variety I do not hesitate to grade as absolutely insufficient.

There are some German dishes (incidentally, I like and respect German food), but only as a sort of afterthought. The German potatoes were horrible, the Caesar salad contained croutons that had until then remained untouched by a human hand (and you could tell), the sausages were good but the merit was likely not the cook's, the Italian cold meats tasty and fresh, but bare and lonely on their dish, not accompanied by even an olive (or bread!), as if they had just been forgotten there.

 I would have tried Eisbein, a German traditional, but it was far too expensive: in a place like Franziskaner, I wouldn't risk 3800 yen on anything.

I wasn't the only one to be disappointed: thinking that the menu was limited because we were in the bar, my friend Claus proposed to go upstairs to the restaurant, but he was told not to bother: the menu upstairs is the same.

If food is a disaster, what else is there?

There remains the ambience (good), several excellent German beers including Weissbier, rare in Japan, and assorted other alcoholic drinks.

Alas, that's not enough to redeem Franziskaner's too numerous flaws, at least not in my book. I can find a quiet table and good beer elsewhere, and that's what I will do.

In conclusion, if you have eaten somewhere else in the neighborhood, for example at the excellent Ferrara, and want a quality beer, Franziskaner can do the job. Its beers are a bit expensive, but worth the money.

But if German food is what you want, Bernd's Bar or Die Pauke are still the way to go.