The pub that feels like a cave
Photo placeholder: the Eisgrub-Bräu interior, or the beer mug pair on a table.
My husband had a layover in Mainz. I'd flown along, the way I sometimes do when his schedule lines up with a city I want to walk around in. We'd already done the cathedral and the river. We needed dinner. He'd been told by another pilot to try the Eisgrub-Bräu — an underground brewery built into the old fortifications of the city. You walk down a flight of stairs and the whole room is stone — vaulted ceiling, low lighting, the smell of yeast.
It feels like a cave. That's the whole appeal. You're three meters under the street, drinking beer brewed twenty feet away, and the temperature is the same year-round because you're inside the earth. The food is the kind of German cooking that doesn't apologize — pork knuckle, sauerkraut, pretzels the size of your face. The beer is brewed on premises.
They serve it in heavy ceramic mugs with the brewery's name on the side. Not glass — actual stoneware, the kind that holds temperature, that has weight in your hand. I drank one, looked at it, and asked the server if they sold them. They did. I bought a pair.
They've come out for company exactly once since I got them home — when my sister and her husband came over for dinner and I wanted to do the Germany-feel right. The rest of the time they live on a shelf in the kitchen where I see them every day. That's the function. Some objects do their work just by being visible.