Most travel guides to Frankfurt treat the Bahnhofsviertel as a warning. They note the drug consumption room on Niddastraße, the visible poverty, the general reputation for difficulty, and then move on quickly to the Römerberg. It is a reasonable precaution for a travel guide with limited space and a need to keep things simple. It is also a significant piece of misdirection, because the station quarter is the most internationally diverse square kilometre in Germany and contains some of the best food in Frankfurt by a considerable margin.
The neighbourhood's reputation was fixed in the 1970s and 1980s and has been diverging from reality in increments ever since. Difficult patches remain, particularly around Elbestraße. The social infrastructure that keeps people alive in the worst circumstances is visible here in a way it is not in the Westend or Bornheim. None of this makes Münchener Straße in the early evening a hostile place to walk. The two things coexist, as they coexist in every large European city that is honest about what it contains.
The food
In roughly 800 metres of Münchener Straße you will find restaurants from Turkey, Lebanon, Vietnam, Japan, West Africa, Morocco, Iraq, South Korea and several other places, most of them run by people from those countries and most of them serving food that has no structural reason to compromise for external tastes. Their primary customers are the communities they grew up in. The food is made accordingly.
This is a categorically different thing from international cuisine as performed for mainstream audiences. The lahmacun on Münchener Straße is not an approximation. The Vietnamese pho on Moselstraße tastes like it does because the person making it learned it from someone who learned it in Vietnam. The Japanese grocery on Kaiserstraße stocks ingredients that are not available anywhere else in the city centre and is worth a look even if you have no particular plan to cook anything.
Münchener Straße for Turkish, Kurdish and Lebanese food. Mixed meze plates and lahmacun are the things to order. Moselstraße for Vietnamese, particularly pho and banh mi. For late-night döner, the places near the station that have been there for decades are better than anything in the Innenstadt, by some distance.
What has been building up
Over the past twenty years, a layer of bars, galleries, music venues and small creative businesses has settled into the Bahnhofsviertel alongside the existing migrant economy. The result is a neighbourhood with actual edge and actual content at the same time, which is a combination that becomes rarer in German cities as property prices and strategic branding smooth the interesting parts away. The galleries on Gutleutstraße sit next to the Vietnamese grocery that has been there since the 1980s. A restaurant with a Michelin star occupies a building on Weserstraße that also contains a nail salon and a calling-card shop.
Richard David Precht has argued that genuine social contact between people from different backgrounds requires proximity of a specific kind: shared spaces, shared infrastructure, shared streets, not just demographic adjacency in separate lives. The Bahnhofsviertel is not a model of anything. It is a complicated neighbourhood with real problems and real qualities, which is a more interesting thing to be than a model. The question of whether Frankfurt invests in it or continues to manage it mainly as a problem is live, and the answer will matter more than the city has yet acknowledged.
Early evening, from around 6pm, is the best time. The restaurants are filling, the street is alive. Walk two blocks south from the station forecourt to Kaiserstraße, or west to Münchener Straße: the character changes immediately at that distance. The station exit itself is not the neighbourhood.