Hopfen & Co. — Restaurant in Bolzano - Bozen

We asked around for locally produced beer and were shown to Hopfen e Co - a brew pub (which indeed makes the beer very local). I ordered a darker kind - a big glass - and as I have a big nose I always smell things before I try them. The smell wasn't promising - to say the least. It smelled like sewer. But hey - a lot of beers have funny smells and I thought I'd try something new. It wasn't very good at all. We left without doing anything more than just sipping our beers.

But my story doesn't end there. We met up with some local friends and asked them to pick a place. Guess which place they chose..? So - we went there again - for food - and I had decided to have a bottled beer instead - only I received the same thing I had some days earlier. This time, however, it was good. It smelled allright and it was a pretty good beer. Perhaps there was something amiss last time?

The food was nice. Tyrolean. I ate too much, as usual, because it is so dreamy with all its simple but carefully selected ingredients. That, together with decent service, old fashioned Teutonic pub fashion plus the fact that I adore brew pubs, makes Hopfen e Co. a place that I will probably visit again, but that first meeting with their home brew (which should have been a passionate one) put me off. That's why I'm rating the place with three stars...

So.. we live in Bozen and we know where locals and where turists are used to eat. The “”good”” thing about this restaurant is that the kitchen is open the whole afternoon, we were hungry at 16 so we decided to try. Never again. I am sorry. We choose the meat but it didn’t have any taste, not at all and it’s strange because we saw spices on it. A mistery. The wurstel were also cooked badly, super hard and dry, no taste. Canederli were horrible (kind of wet??? Boh..), the speck inside very low quality and the cappuccio salad probably old (very slimy). 22 euro for person is not even that bad for so much meat, but now we understand why such a low price. We tried a dessert: sweet canederli made with ricotta filled with chocolate. Not bad, shame they were microwaved.

Beer was nice, though.

Maybe we were...

Was there during the weekend for a lunch. Nice atmosphere, dinning outside, waitresses organized and friendly. We didn’t wait for so long for the service. Food was delicious.

I ordered a bistecca di lombata di vitello - local veal loin steak with chanterelle sauce, potatoes and green beans with bacon; cabbage salad and the sin after - Topfenknödel. Everything was excellent, meet was melting in the mouth basically. Dessert delicious.

I would highly recommend visiting this restaurant. Big plus as they work during all the day and they don’t close from 15-18h, as we arrived around 15:30h for a lunch, which is late for the Italian standards 😅

Excellent quality price ratio.

We are looking forward to coming back to this restaurant...