Oktoberfest food and drink

What's really on the table

Ask most Americans what people eat at Oktoberfest and you'll hear the same answer: bratwurst, sauerkraut, maybe a pretzel, all of it washed down with a stein of dark beer. It's a reasonable guess. It's also, for the most part, wrong.

The single most popular dish at Munich's Oktoberfest is roast chicken. Whole mackerel is grilled on sticks over open charcoal. One tent is built around a spit-roasted ox. And tucked in among the beer halls is a large tent that doesn't serve festival beer at all, because it's given over to wine.

Oktoberfest is a beer festival, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But it's also one of the great eating events of the European calendar, and the food is far stranger and more specific than the version that made it across the Atlantic. Here's what's actually on the table.

A short history of the Wiesn

The festival began in October 1810 as a wedding party. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate on the meadows outside the city gates. The party went well enough to be repeated the following year, and then more or less every year since, interrupted only by wars, a cholera outbreak, and most recently a pandemic.

Those meadows were named the Theresienwiese in the bride's honor, and Munich locals still call the whole festival the Wiesn — literally "the meadow." If you hear someone say they're going to the Wiesn, that's Oktoberfest.

The name is now a small joke on itself. During the nineteenth century the dates crept backward into September to catch better weather, and today the festival starts on the Saturday after September 15 and runs until the first Sunday in October, with an extension if that Sunday falls before German Unity Day on October 3. So an event called Oktoberfest spends most of its life in September. In 2026 it runs from September 19 to October 4.

One rule has shaped the festival more than any other: only six breweries, all of them within Munich's city limits, are permitted to pour there. Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner and Spaten have held that monopoly for well over a century, and it's the reason Oktoberfest beer is a genuinely distinct thing rather than a marketing label.

The beer, and why it's not what you think

Beer brewed for the festival is called Wiesnbier, and each of the six breweries produces its own version to be sold only during those sixteen days. It's noticeably stronger than everyday German lager, typically around 6 percent alcohol, which matters a great deal when it arrives in a Maß — the one-liter glass or ceramic stein that is the only size sold in the tents. That's just over two US pints, and it's the standard unit. Carrying eight or ten full ones at once is a professional skill in Munich, and it earns real respect.

The style most associated with the festival is Märzen, and the name explains itself once you know the history. Before refrigeration, brewing in the summer heat was unreliable, so Bavarian brewers made a stronger, more robust beer in March, cellared it through the warm months, and drank what was left in the autumn. Modern Wiesnbier has drifted lighter and more golden than the classic amber Märzen, which is why the beer in the tents may not look like the "Oktoberfest" bottle you'd buy in a US store.

There's much more to say about how these styles differ and where they came from, and we've covered some of that background in our guide to beer in Germany and in the wider history of beermaking.

The food: roast chicken, fish on a stick, and a salted radish

Here's where the popular image goes furthest astray.

Hendl — roast chicken — is the defining Oktoberfest dish, eaten in quantities that are difficult to picture. It's usually sold as a half bird, rubbed with butter and salt, sometimes parsley, and turned on rotisseries until the skin is lacquered and crackling. It's eaten with your hands, over paper, and it is the thing you order if you order one thing.

Steckerlfisch is the other great open-fire dish, and the one visitors tend to remember. A whole mackerel or trout is skewered lengthwise on a wooden stake, brushed with oil and salt, and roasted upright in rows around a charcoal trench. You eat it off the stick. The smell of the Steckerlfisch stands is one of the defining smells of the festival.

Obatzda is a soft, orange-pink cheese spread made by mashing ripe Camembert with butter, sweet paprika, chopped onion and often a splash of wheat beer. It began as a beer-garden solution to over-ripe cheese and became a Bavarian institution. It's worth being precise about this one, because it gets confused with American beer cheese — the cheddar-based dip from Kentucky and Wisconsin — and the two have almost nothing in common beyond the presence of beer.

Brezn, the Bavarian pretzel, is not the mall pretzel. It's dipped in a lye solution before baking, which gives it a thin, dark, faintly bitter crust, and it's shaped with thin crossed arms and a fat belly. The belly is the good part. It's often split and buttered, and it's the natural partner for Obatzda.

Schweinshaxe is roasted pork knuckle, the skin blistered to something close to crackling, served with the bone still in. It's enormous and it's meant to be.

Radi is the detail that gives the game away. A large white radish is peeled and cut in one continuous spiral, then heavily salted so that it slumps and weeps. It's crisp, peppery and very salty, which makes you thirsty, which sells more beer. Nobody involved is being subtle about this.

The Ochsenbraterei is a tent given over to spit-roasted ox, and it keeps a public tally of how many it has served over the season. Sliced ox with gravy and a dumpling is one of the more traditional plates on the ground.

For dessert there's Kaiserschmarrn, a thick pancake torn into pieces as it cooks, dusted heavily with powdered sugar and served with stewed plums or apple sauce. The name translates roughly as "the emperor's mess," which is fair.

Sausage and sauerkraut do appear — Bratwurst is sold, and sauerkraut turns up alongside the pork. They're simply not the headline. Treating them as the whole story is a bit like flying to New Orleans and eating only at the hotel breakfast buffet.

The tent that doesn't serve beer

Wine has been poured at Oktoberfest since 1885, when a Spanish bodega set up on the grounds. That's a longer continuous history than most of what visitors think of as traditional, and it has survived into the present in the form of one large tent devoted to wine, sparkling wine and Champagne.

It's decorated in the style of a Franconian wine garden, a reference to Franken — the German wine region east of Frankfurt, known for dry Silvaner and for bottling in a distinctive flattened, rounded bottle. Wheat beer is served there until 9pm, and after that it's wine only, which makes it the one place on the Theresienwiese where the beer runs out on purpose.

For anyone who finds a liter of lager an intimidating opening move, it's a genuinely useful thing to know exists.

Bringing Oktoberfest to your own table

Almost none of this requires a tent. If you're hosting eight people, the most authentic thing you can do is also the easiest: roast chickens, not a sausage platter. Two or three birds, buttered and salted, carved into halves and quarters, put out on a board with paper napkins and no ceremony.

Build around that. Pretzels and a bowl of Obatzda to start, then the sides any German cookout would recognize. Potato salad is essential, and it's worth knowing there are two schools: the warm kind dressed with broth,vinegar and bacon, like our warm German potato salad with bacon, the northern German potato salad or the Swabian potato salad. Alongside it, put out a Weißkrautsalat — finely shredded white cabbage with vinegar and caraway — because something sharp and acidic has to cut through all that roast skin and butter. And if your grill is already lit, Schaschlik-Rolle earns its place next to the chicken: it isn't Oktoberfest food in any strict sense, but it comes from the same German outdoor-cooking tradition and it feeds a crowd without much fuss.

For the beer, imported Wiesnbier is hard to find outside Germany, but US breweries release Oktoberfest and Märzen-style lagers every year from late August, and a good one is a fair substitute. If you'd rather pour wine, take the hint from the wine tent: a dry German Riesling or a Franken Silvaner handles roast chicken, cured pork and salty cheese better than almost anything else, and it won't leave anyone horizontal by nine.

Oktoberfest outside Germany

The festival travelled with German emigration and changed as it went. Blumenau in southern Brazil hosts one of the largest Oktoberfests in the world, founded by German settlers and now thoroughly Brazilian. Villa General Belgrano in Argentina runs a national beer festival on the same model. Kitchener-Waterloo in Ontario and Cincinnati in Ohio both hold enormous versions, the latter with a competitive race involving a giant sausage.

None of them is a copy of Munich, and that's what makes them interesting. Each one absorbed local ingredients, local tastes and local ideas of what a festival is for.

Explore

This is the overview. We like to go deeper.

• Oktoberfest beer explained — Festbier, Märzen, Dunkel and Helles, and how the six Munich breweries differ
• What Germans actually eat at Oktoberfest — every dish above, in detail, with its origins
• The wine tent at Oktoberfest — Franken wine, Silvaner, and 140 years of wine at a beer festival
• Obatzda — the recipe, and why it isn't beer cheese
• Oktoberfest around the world — Blumenau, Villa General Belgrano, Kitchener-Waterloo and beyond