Welcome to Bavaria-on-Thames

You can imagine the response of the planners, the licensing authorities and environmental health. 'So you want to open a Bavarian-style beer garden on the Thames towpath just along from Richmond bridge? You think simple outdoor benches and tables will be fine, and you'll offer a Bavarian menu and huge steins of German beer?'

To put the official nose further out of joint, the site was previously occupied by a heavily graffitied, dingy cafe. It's hard to credit that anyone could be audacious enough to want to sell alcohol from premises that had previously been unlicensed. But when it comes to alcohol the Germans have a different attitude to us Brits - beer is food, and wine is an essential part of civilisation.

Our congratulations are due to the dogged owners of Steins. They filled in all the forms, opening their own little bit of Bavaria-on-Thames in the summer of 2004.

The nerve centre of the operation is a neat wooden building tucked up behind the towpath and sited to the rear of 55 Petersham Road. This must be the only restaurant in London that has no indoor seating: in front of the 'hut' tables and benches seat 280 (not quite the 1,000-seat operation you'd find in München, but bold for Richmond).

The idea is that Steins is open until 10pm, with lunch served between noon and 3pm, and breakfast, dinner, coffee and cakes served throughout. This place has a restaurant licence so you can only drink alcohol when you order food, and then it's limited to beer and wine. So no alcopops or two-for-one vodka offers, which is just fine.

The two main draught beers are Paulaner Helles (the golden lager-style one) and Erdinger Weissbier (the cloudy wheat beer one), and you can drink them from two-pint steins which cost £6.20. Most of the bottles on the wine list stay the right side of £15.

The Bavarian specialities on the menu revolve around sausages, and very good they are, too. The Nürnberger wurst are small and wellspiced. The Thüringer bratwurst is a larger, meatier, porkier number.

The Münchner weisswurst is a white veal sausage that is boiled rather than grilled, and it's the traditional accompaniment to wheat beer at breakfast time. Sausages come with decent sauerkraut and mash, or stunning pretzels in the case of the weisswurst. Some are teamed with bratkartoffeln, which translates as chunky saute potatoes with attitude.

Perhaps because of the proximity to the London German School in Petersham, a large proportion of the customers at Steins can be heard talking in German, and they seem to give the grub the thumbs-up.

They may even feel warmly towards the Münchner leberkäse which is billed as meatloaf - you do indeed get a piece of grilled pink stuff the same size as a slice of Mother's Pride. As to the taste, an eminent foodie remarked: 'It's kind of like a frankfurter. Once you get used to it, it's OK.'