The Bockenheim institution that served Frankfurt's students, Spontis, and professors from 1930 to 2016.
Pielok stood at Jordanstrasse 3 in Bockenheim for 86 years, and for most of them it functioned as the unofficial canteen of Frankfurt's university quarter. Katharina Krebs opened the room as Cafe Krebs in 1930; her sister Maria Pielok took it over in 1941 and gave the house its lasting name.
Frankfurt's Genussmagazin called it an institution when it reported the closure: the Gehring brothers, the last operators, poured the final round on December 30, 2016 and retired. Nothing trades at the address under the Pielok name today. We keep the page as a record, and we point cider pilgrims to the houses that carry the tradition on, starting with the Frankfurt wine bars guide and the full Frankfurt bar guide.
Pielok is gone, but Frankfurt's family run cider houses still pour. Cross the river to the Sachsenhausen tavern row or head to Bornheim for a house pressing.
Pielok ran as a paneled, plain spoken Wirtshaus a few minutes from Bockenheimer Warte, with home cooking added to the menu during the war years. The room never chased fashion across eight decades, which is exactly why three generations of students kept coming back.
After the war the house became the dining room of Bockenheim's academic milieu. Genussmagazin Frankfurt records that the tables mixed the Sponti scene around Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit with professors like the Mitscherlichs, all eating the same plain Frankfurt plates. Few city taverns can claim that kind of guest book.
The cooking stayed plain Frankfurt throughout: lunch plates added in the 1940s, Apfelwein alongside, nothing on the menu chasing a trend. Local directories like Gastroguide and frankfurt-tipp.de filed it under traditional German cooking to the end. That consistency is what let a 1930 cafe survive as a 2016 institution.
Hans Juergen and Peter Gehring ran the final stretch and closed the house for reasons of age, not trade. The local press treated the last service like a small civic funeral, and the room had earned it after 86 years under three names and one address. Bockenheim has not replaced it; the university quarter's drinking has scattered toward the Warte and the city center since.
