This week’s travel dream: Hamburg’s quiet grandeur

Hamburg, Germany, “is not a city that shows off,” said Gini Alhadeff in Travel + Leisure. A historic harbor town that has never been home to royalty, it “offers a stately, comfortable beauty without grandiosity,” and the presence of Alster Lake at its center lends every day a reflective air. Change can be seen coming in one corner—the formerly run-down port district known as HafenCity. Such renowned architects as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid have been enlisted to remake it, and the new Elbe Philharmonic Hall—“a stunning folly of a building”—will soon give the city “an icon as alluring as any siren architecture of our time.”

A veil of mist enveloped me as I walked through the center of town past a string of museums. “There are many canals in Hamburg, and many bridges—“more, they say, than in Venice and Amsterdam put together.” I avoided the fur and jewelry shops of affluent Neuer Jungfernstieg, a street fronting Alster Lake, before stopping at the Rathaus, Hamburg’s grand 1897 town hall. Steps away sits Café Paris, a venerable institution and “one of the city’s liveliest establishments.” I never would make it to St. Pauli, the red-light district where street prostitution is legal and other women are barred entry to certain streets. But I quickly decided that sitting at Café Paris “was the most fun to be had in Hamburg.” Under the shimmering tiled ceiling, a glamorous young crowd flirted, argued, and put away platefuls of steak tartare and mussels, “all at a furious rate.”

“It’s funny how the day appears to last different lengths in different parts of the world.” Throughout the Cold War era, Hamburg was hemmed in by the nearby border with East Germany, and grew accustomed to shutting down around 9 every night. The city is more extroverted today, but it still operates at a leisurely enough pace that a visitor can always find, “between getting things done,” time to stop at a café to read a newspaper or book. A “quietly old-fashioned and architecturally futuristic little capital of contentment,” Hamburg grows on you.

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Doubles at Hotel Atlantic Kempinski (kempinski.com), Hamburg’s “grandest of grand hotels,” start at $234.