Tucked away in the far corner of the Osteria Italiana's Bismarck Room is table number eight.
At first glance, perhaps the most striking thing about it is the eclectic array of artwork that can be seen on the walls of the restaurant behind it, including a Beryl Cook print of a waitress juggling champagne bottles and a black and white photo of rock star Sting with the owner Prisco. de Stefano.
There are also a number of baseball bats hanging on coat hooks ('just for fun', a regular customer helpfully tells me) and a shelf displays brightly painted ceramics.
So far so innocently quirky. But it was this table in the cozy, wood-paneled, parquet-floored diner that was Adolf Hitler's favorite – and was probably where Unity Mitford joined him on numerous occasions.
In light of the discovery of the anti-Semitic aristocrat's diaries recording their encounters, I followed in her footsteps to this Munich restaurant – although, unlike her, I was certainly not looking for a dictatorial Nazi suitor.
Osteria Italiana, on the corner of an inconspicuous street, doesn't look anything special from the outside.
Apart from a faux bunch of grapes hanging above the front door and a few Christmas lights in the windows, you might even say the stucco-adorned neoclassical-style facade is looking a bit tired.
Inside, however, it has an old-world charm all its own, with some features dating back to its opening in 1890. At the time it was called Osteria Bavaria – and was one of the first Italian restaurants in Germany.
Adolf Hitler with Franz von Pfefferin and Unity Mitford, who went to his favorite restaurant for days in 1936 hoping he would notice her
That's what it was still called in the 1930s, when Unity began her sickening quest to meet Hitler by going to the restaurant every day in the hope that he would notice her.
Her wish was granted on February 9, 1935, when the upper-class twenty-year-old was finally rewarded with an invitation to join him at his table – which she recorded in her diary as 'the most beautiful day of my life'. After later meetings she talked about how “very sweet and cheerful” the Führer was.
Waiters and restaurant staff have become accustomed to requests from tourists wanting to sit at 'Hitler's favorite table'. When I made the same request shortly after opening on Friday at noon, they politely seated me at the infamous table #8.
The 63-year-old Mr. de Stefano, owner of the restaurant for 27 years, even stops by for a chat. 'Yes, this is the table that Hitler loved. It's in a corner and you can see the door, so he could see if people were coming and make sure everything was under control,” he says.
'Some people come from abroad and only come here because they want to sit at that table. It's a bit crazy. But most of our customers come from Munich. They don't talk about Hitler. We also have Jewish customers.'
He adds plaintively, “I'd much rather people talk about how good the food and wine is here.” The restaurant first earned the affection of Hitler – an occasional vegetarian – when he lived in Munich in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was the location for his regular 'stammtisch' meetings with political friends, where they discussed how to 'save' Germany.
He also courted Eva Braun here, having first met her in 1929, when he was 40 and she was 17. She worked in a camera shop run by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, just down the road.
During our trip to Munich, photographer Murray Sanders and I also visited an apartment building a ten-minute walk away on Agnessstrasse, where Unity had an apartment – after Hitler arranged to have it confiscated from a Jewish couple.
Prisco de Stefano, owner of the Osteria Italiana, formerly known as the Osteria Bavaria
David Wilkes dines at 'Hitler's favorite table', tucked away in a corner of the restaurant
De Stefano says Hitler reportedly enjoyed the spinach soup and the diplomatic pies with cream and cherries that were on the menu
No one there knew which of the ten flats was hers. We also went to the expansive Englischer Garten, Munich's largest park, where Unity strolled with her SS lovers – and where she shot herself while sitting on a bench.
Mr de Stefano, originally from Salerno in south-west Italy, worked around the world, including at the Savoy Hotel in London, on cruise ships and in top kitchens in Switzerland and Paris before buying the restaurant.
He says he was drawn to it because of his interest in wine (there are currently some 16,000 bottles in the labyrinthine cellar) and the restaurant's largely untouched charm.
“The decor is like going back in time,” he says. 'It has been kept old. Another area features murals dating from 1890.”
He recalls an elderly patron who remembered the “Mitford woman” who wanted to meet Hitler. 'And there was an old man – now also dead – who said that if Hitler came in, other customers had to leave, so that only he and his friends were there.'
Of the Führer's favorites on the menu, Mr. de Stefano says: “I was told he liked the spinach soup they made here, and diplomatic pies with cream and cherries.”
He shows me a guestbook, signed by, among others, the German tennis star Steffi Graf. Other famous visitors include Monica Lewinsky, and Boris Becker is said to be particularly fond of dining in the restaurant's courtyard.
I'm initially the only restaurant in the Bismarck Room (so named because a large portrait of Otto von Bismarck, Germany's 19th-century 'Iron Chancellor', once hung on the wall), but later a regular customer, Ernst Runge , 78, a real estate manager, takes a seat at his usual table, No. 5.
“I've been coming here for lunch every day for 20 years,” he says. “I love the white tablecloths and how they treat me so nicely.”
Mr Runge, who recently celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with his wife Ursula, added: 'I don't think about the Hitler connection. There are not many restaurants in Munich with this old-fashioned atmosphere. And the food is always good.'
I opt for a main course of ravioli with balsamic parmesan and walnuts (£25), followed by tiramisu (£11). Murray opts for tagliolini with black truffle and quail eggs (€28), then a dark chocolate mousse (€11).
As delicious as our lunch is, there's something creepy about occupying a genocidal maniac's favorite spot – and imagining the anti-Semitic venom exchanged across the table between him and the lovelorn British debutante who longs to be at his feet worship.
