It’s a vegetarian’s wurst nightmare! Inside the world’s only ‘sausage hotel’, where room numbers are printed on butchers’ knives
- The links are endless: sausage motifs appear everywhere from the hotel’s wallpaper to its soap
- The hotel was opened by a butcher who wanted to ‘make the bratwurst attractive for the whole world’
- Its ‘Wurstaurant’ serves a full range of sausage-related dishes, including sausage ice cream
What happens when a German butcher opens a hotel? A vegetarian’s wurst nightmare.
There are pictures of sausages on the wallpaper, sausage-shaped pillows on the beds and bratwurst hanging from the ceiling. The room numbers are printed on butchers’ knives and even the soap looks like sausage.
The ‘Wurstaurant’ downstairs serves a full range of sausage-related dishes, including sausage ice cream.
Meat and tidy: At this bold bed and breakfast, sausages appear everywhere, from the throw pillows to the wallpaper
Located just a 40-minute drive south of Nuremberg, the Bratwurst Hotel has done brisk business since opening in September – both international and European guests have popped in for a visit.
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In a slope-roofed stone house, the BB&BB (which stands for Boebel Bratwurst Bed and Breakfast) is equipped with seven rooms and two conference spaces.
Behind the quirky initiative is a Hail Mary bid to keep the local butcher’s shop – an institution in most towns that was once a pillar of Germany’s ‘Mittelstand’ economy – alive in the face of big-box store competition and slacking meat consumption.
‘This is the absolute bratwurst heaven and I love that,’ said Claus Boebel, the butcher who opened the hotel in Bavaria.
An absolute banger: Sausage hearts decorate the rooms of what is quite clearly an audacious dream-come-true for owner Claus Boebel, a third-generation butcher
‘I wanted to get a bit of holiday feeling in my house and… make the bratwurst attractive for the whole world.’
The Boebel family has produced and sold meats here since the 19th century.
‘I want to show that small craftsman shops like mine can survive when you have clever ideas,’ said Boebel, seated on a stool shaped like a tin of minced sausage.
‘Plus I love life here in the countryside and, rather than leave, want to draw customers here to Rittersbach,’ population 300, he added.
The exterior of the world’s first and only sausage hotel only hints at its compelling culinary-themed contents
It’s not the first time Boebel, 48, has got creative to promote his brand, beginning in 2003 with his ‘wurstbrief’, or sausage letter, featuring a vacuum-packed envelope with the meat and a postcard inside ready for mailing to friends and family.
And Boebel’s bright green delivery car – matching the hotel’s wooden window shutters and the striking facade of the butcher’s shop – zips through the village’s narrow roads as a ‘wurst taxi’ bringing meat to hungry customers.
He also launched a global online shop, sending his canned wares made from locally sourced livestock to a clientele in far-flung places like Hawaii and Jamaica.
But the hotel, in which he’s invested around £600,000 (700,000 euros) to renovate, takes things to another level.
Claus Boebel, master butcher and operator of the Bratwurst Hotel (right), renovated the majority of his space to salute the lifespan of a sausage
In the narrow lobby of the hotel, the word ‘sausage’ is emblazoned on the wall in the languages of the world including Russian (kolbasa), Japanese (soseji) and Greek (loukaniko).
The seven rooms all include breakfast, with a healthy helping of sausage, of course.
‘What is special about the rooms is their comprehensive design,’ he says, listing the assorted sausage-themed features of the decor, which also includes coat racks shaped like butchers’ knives and giant pigs on the frosted glass doors to the bathrooms.
Older proprietors often can’t find a successor when they retire, or they succumb to the stiff competition from big supermarket chains, discounters and even Amazon.
Fleshing out the details: Soap in the shape of a Landjaeger sausage at the Franconian guesthouse
Joerg Ruckriegel, 47, of the municipal tourism office, said businesses like the sausage hotel are helping to reverse the trend and put the Franconia region where the hotel is located more prominently on the tourism map.
‘You have a lot of small villages with so much history – palaces and castles and beautiful landscapes, plus the regional cuisine,’ he said.
‘The small butchers’ shops that still make their own products are a big part of that.’
Tourist Jovina Sperling said she felt ‘right at home’ at the Bratwurst Hotel.
‘I’ll go back to Nigeria knowing how to make sausage – danke Boebels!!’ she wrote in the guest book.
The bratwurst-filled B&B chose to swap out traditional room service signs for some sausage-serving alternatives
Guests can take home souvenirs including canned minced sausage flavoured with beer, coffee and even chocolate.
Boebel and his wife Monika also offer workshops in making personalised types of wurst using a range of meats and spices.
Boebel wants to create an ‘experience’ for his customers, something that will lure them from the autobahn and into the heart of a Germany at once traditional and Instagrammably ultra-modern.
That includes offering beef sausage for Muslim and Jewish guests who don’t eat pork.
‘Sausage is what we in Germany are known best for, next to beer,’ the father-of-two said with a smile.
‘If that’s what tourists are looking for, why not give it to them?’
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