Snack · Bavarian
Overripe Camembert mashed with butter, raw onion, paprika, caraway, and beer. Served with a pretzel or dark bread as the essential beer garden accompaniment. The perfect thing to eat with your first beer at the Augustiner.
Obatzda starts with a Camembert that has aged past the point where anyone would want to serve it on a cheese board. The riper, the better: the stronger the smell, the more flavour survives the mashing. The cheese is worked together with soft butter until smooth, then mixed with raw diced onion, sweet paprika, caraway seeds, and a splash of beer. The caraway is the signature; it gives the spread a warm, slightly anise-like edge that separates it from every other cheese spread you have eaten elsewhere.
It is beer garden food. It belongs on a wooden table in the open air, served in a small crock with a pretzel (Breze) or thick slices of dark bread, alongside a Mass of lager in a dimpled glass. The Augustiner Braustuebl Muelln in Mülln, a former monastery brewery with a vast chestnut garden seating several thousand people, is the most complete setting for this combination in Salzburg. You carry your own beer from the tap inside, find a table in the garden, and this is what you order first.
Stieglkeller on Festungsberg and Franziskischlossl on Kapuzinerberg both serve versions with comparable views. The dish is Bavarian by origin, but the borderland between Salzburg and Bavaria runs close enough that it is completely at home here, and no one on either side of the border treats it as foreign.
Where to find it
Operating since 1621
One of the largest and most atmospheric beer halls in Austria, founded by the Augustinian friars of Mülln in 1621 and run since 1835 by the Benedictine Abbey of Michaelbeuern. Visitors collect beer directly from wooden barrels. The garden seats thousands. Adjacent to Mulln Church.
Built 1629
A small baroque fortification at the Kapuzinerberg summit (1629), now a seasonal beer garden with panoramic views. Real historic structure, modest beer garden, and a 30-minute walk to get there: a character no purpose-built café can replicate.
A large traditional beer garden on the Festungsberg slope between the funicular station and Hohensalzburg Fortress. One of the most dramatically positioned outdoor drinking venues in Salzburg. Connected to Stiegl Brewery (since 1492). Seasonal.
