Festival · Late May into early June
Fressgassfest (the food street festival)
Fressgass translates roughly as pig-out alley, and the street has earned the name for over a century. Its festival, held since 1974 between the Große Bockenheimer Straße and the Opernplatz, is the first big street party of the Frankfurt year.
The Fressgass is the stretch between the Kalbächer Gasse, the Große Bockenheimer Straße and the Opernplatz, and the nickname goes back more than a hundred years. Nobody can prove exactly how it started, but around 1900 those 250 meters held almost nothing but butchers, bakeries, greengrocers, fishmongers and delicatessens, plus restaurants and wine rooms. Mathilde von Rothschild shopped here, and so did Otto von Bismarck, who liked to eat well and often.
The festival was a rescue operation. By the early 1970s the street had gone quiet, the shops were struggling and the restaurants were empty even on weekends. In 1974 the local business association, the Aktionsgemeinschaft Fressgass, launched a street festival to bring people back, and it worked within a few years. It now draws more than 250,000 visitors and has become a fixed part of the city's event calendar. There is a nice civic detail behind it: most of the proceeds flow back into Frankfurt's Christmas lighting.
The festival is deliberately relaxed. Restaurants and bars set up outside, there is music, wine to taste and a food lineup that runs from Asia to the United States, Africa and around Europe, alongside German classics. Drinks cover wine and beer from around the world, fine fruit brandies and a guuden Stöffsche, meaning a good apple wine. The rest of the year the Fressgass is one of the priciest shopping streets in the city, full of jewelry, designer fashion and electronics, so festival week is also when the shops put out their offers.
