It's a familiar tale. Chefs all over the world are creating modern versions of traditional dishes but it seems particularly startling in Bavaria, a region synonymous with Brobdingnagian sausages, bowling ball dumplings and where stewed pigs' knuckles come in a bunch of fives.
Here they are so wedded to their traditional staples, handcuffed by twists of thick doughy pretzels, you would think putting a modern spin on Bavarian cooking would be like taking their beloved lederhosen and doing a light cotton version in a nice eggshell blue.
But Schuhbeck opened his eponymous restaurant in central Munich last February and it has been doing well. "The Bavarian kitchen is no longer just Schweinebraten and litres of beer," he told me, even though he has opened two doors down from the 5,000-seat Hofbrauhaus where for most tourists and stag parties it really is just that, and with a hearty garnish of oompah bands on the side. But with a full house last Friday and surely a Michelin star on its way, Schuhbeck's vision of new Bavaria is here to stay.
There is a place for the old and the new in modern Munich, a city that impresses with its green swathes and ancient spires, a very civilised sort of city which embodies a gentler, gemutlich Germany. This is certainly a place that deserves to be visited for more than the consumption of staggering quantities of beer during Oktoberfest.
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My own pilgrimage was to the Pinakothek der Moderne and it left me as light-headed as a litre of weissbier. The gallery in the museum quarter, which opened last autumn, may not have garnered the column inches of the Tate Modern or had cultural tourists digging out their passports like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but it did gather more visitors in the first week — 300,000 — than any gallery before it. Who would have thought such an immense block of concrete, glass and steel could fly? There is such a lightness in the design of the Pinakothek der Moderne you would think the architect Stephan Braunfels had discovered some hitherto-unknown property of simple concrete. Diagonal walkways lead to a 90ft rotunda flooded with light from a glass dome. Pure cube-like galleries, uncluttered by the paraphernalia of picture-hangings, fire extinguishers, air conditioning or security systems, allow you to gaze at the work undistracted.
Light is the most important element in a gallery and, even though 40% of the museum is below ground level, this is a daylight museum that even had its own "daylight planner", Hanns Freymuth, during construction to supervise the recessed ceiling installations.
Braunfels gave me a valuable piece of advice before touring the building. "Wherever you walk always turn back, always look behind." I did and often saw another unexpected slant on his building, another soft curve disappearing into a pale pool of concrete or just a remarkable axis of angles.
The critic William Cook has described the gallery's birth as "the final, triumphant chapter in the struggle for the tortured soul of German art". This was a battle that began in 1937, when the core of the collection was exhibited in Munich in a Nazi exhibition labelled Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The idea was to make sure everyone knew exactly which forms of art were not acceptable. During the Entartete Kunst campaign, more than 20,000 works were confiscated and hundreds of artists, particularly expressionists, were proclaimed mad.
That many of their works survived is partly due to the efforts of two Rome-based emigres, Sofie and Emanuel Fohn, who sold their established collection of Old Masters and began buying up expressionist paintings to save them from the jackboot.
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Their collection of rescued pieces now hang together in the new gallery alongside post-war German masters like Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. While the best-known modern German works — at least to a foreign tourist — are probably by Max Beckmann who left the country in 1937 never to return, the gallery also houses pictures by Dali, Picasso, Warhol and Bacon.
Most notable among the sculptures, and incidentally it was the Pinakothek's first work of art, is The End of the 20th Century by Joseph Beuys, an apparently random arrangement of 44 basalt columns sprawled across Room 20, representing the communicative capacity of nature.
While it's not unusual to find a hat and coat in a hotel's reception area, the massive trench coat, scarf and hat which hang 12ft above the ground in the Mandarin Oriental in Neuturmstrasse will stop you in your tracks. There is even an outsize copy of the International Herald Tribune sticking out of a coat pocket. It's dated August 8, 1993, the day the installation was donated to the hotel by Gabriele Henkel, wife of an industrialist and renowned collector of the work of Joseph Beuys.
With original artwork draped around its walls you won't be surprised to know the Mandarin is one of the smarter hotels in town, providing succour to stars and royalty alike. When George Hamilton spotted Rod Stewart's name in the guestbook he scribbled a jolly comment about them sharing the same taste in hotels and women (they had both been married to Alana).
It would be hard to imagine the audience at this year's Ring Cycle in Edinburgh coming to blows, unless someone left their mobile phone on. But Munich's citizens are fanatical about their Wagner — Bayreuth is a two-hour drive away and Tristan und Isolde, Die Walkure and Rheingold all received their first performance in the state opera house. This partly explains why the police had to be called in 1994 to quell unrest caused by a new production of Tannhauser by the American director David Alden. A sizable element were disturbed by Alden's use of fascist imagery in a visual representation of the struggle for Germany's soul which had orchestrated Tannhauser's own dilemmas. For some the symbolism had cut too close to the bone.
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It now seems small beer to Munich's concert-goers who have accepted the production with open arms and a brisk demand for tickets. Last Saturday the cast and an exceptional chorus received a warm ovation.
Many of Munich's citizens still attend formal occasions, even opera performances, in traditional dress. While dirndls and funny hats may be more closely associated with Oktoberfest in our minds, it says something about the contemporary Bavarian mindset when the man next to you at a modern opera production is wearing lederhosen.
Details: Lufthansa (0845 773 7747 www.lufthansa.co.uk) flies from Edinburgh to Munich via Frankfurt. Tickets costs from £156.30 including taxes and charges. A double room at the Mandarin Oriental Munich (020 7529 9666 www.mandarinoriental.com) costs from £225 a night including breakfast, late check-out and a free bed for a child under 12 sharing the same room.