Nine centuries ago, bridge workers received their meals at a riverside kitchen. That same kitchen—the Historische Wurstküche—serves up more than 100,000 Regensburger bratwurst each day to locals and visitors. On a sunny day, guests can wait an hour or more to sit elbow-to-elbow on slat benches.

When the weather doesn’t cooperate, the kitchen building itself offers several tables of indoor seating—but smoke permeates every fiber of clothing. The Danube overflows its banks almost annually—to clean out the kitchen, Regenburgers joke—and signs nearly to the ceiling mark the dates and levels of especially cleansing floods.

Outside, waiters weave their way through rows of tables, take orders, and race to the grill, where white-bonneted cooks tend to the charcoal and to the finger-sized sausages: turning them, serving them, adding new ones. Like assembly-line workers, the waiters hold out plates for the right count of sausages—followed by ladles of fresh sauerkraut and sweet mustard—and race back to drop off orders and pick up new ones. With the river, bridge and old city as backdrops, it’s lunch theater at its best.

From the banks of the Danube, it’s a short walk past the former Hotel Zum Weiβen Lamm (where Goethe once stayed en route to Italy) and the Oskar Schindler Haus to the Porta Praetoria. The archway leads into the Bischofshof, the former bishop’s residence built between the 13th and 16th centuries, past the 13th-century parish church of St. Ulrich, and into the Domplatz.