Things to Do in Düsseldorf: Altbier, Gehry and a Japanese Quarter

Düsseldorf's Altstadt is a few compact blocks packed with bars, and locals call it die längste Theke der Welt, the longest bar counter in the world. It is a boast, but standing in it on a Friday evening you understand where it came from.

The city as a whole is richer and more designed than its neighbours: a fashion and advertising town, with money on the Königsallee and architecture down at the harbour. It is also small enough to see properly in a day, which is not true of Cologne.

Düsseldorf drinks Altbier: dark copper, top-fermented, less sweet than it looks. It comes in small straight 0.2-litre glasses, and this is the part visitors get wrong. You do not order each round. The waiter, the Köbes, walks the room with a tray and replaces your empty glass automatically, marking your beermat each time. When you have had enough, put the beermat on top of your glass. Say nothing, and it keeps coming.

The four old brewery pubs in and around the Altstadt each brew their own and each taste different. Try two rather than four, and eat something dark and heavy with it.

One warning that is half joke and half real: do not order Kölsch here, and do not praise Cologne. The rivalry is a game, but it is a game everyone plays.

South of the centre, the old cargo harbour has been rebuilt as an architecture district. The centrepiece is Der Neue Zollhof by Frank Gehry: three buildings that lean and buckle, one white plaster, one red brick, one clad in mirrored steel that picks up the other two. They opened in the late 1990s and they still look like nothing else in Germany.

Go in late afternoon, when the light does the most to the mirrored one. Next door, the Rheinturm carries a vertical row of lights up its shaft that functions as a working clock, and there is a viewing platform near the top.

Düsseldorf has one of the largest Japanese communities in Europe, built up around Japanese firms that based their European operations here. Around Immermannstraße, near the main station, you get bookshops, bakeries, supermarkets and some of the best ramen in Germany. It is not a themed quarter, it is a working one.

In Niederkassel, across the river, the EKŌ-Haus der Japanischen Kultur is a genuine Japanese Buddhist temple with a garden and a traditional house. It is quiet, free of the city noise and worth the tram ride. In late spring the city holds a Japan Day on the riverbank, ending with fireworks.

Out in the south of the city, Schloss Benrath is a pink and grey late-Baroque pleasure palace built for an elector in the eighteenth century, set in a formal park with a long mirror pond. The trick of the building is that it looks like a single-storey villa from the front and turns out to have far more inside than the façade admits. Give yourself the park as well as the house.

On Burgplatz, the Schlossturm stands alone: the surviving tower of a castle that burned and was demolished, now holding a museum of Rhine navigation. Behind it, the Rheinuferpromenade replaced a motorway that was buried in a tunnel in the 1990s, which is why the city suddenly has one of the best riverfronts in Germany. On a warm evening the steps here are where everyone sits.

The centre is walkable and full of things you will miss without a reason to look: the Heine references, the sculpture, the difference between rebuilt and original. A city game takes you through the Altstadt, the Kö and the riverfront solving clues, which is a much better use of an afternoon than shopping. It suits families, friends and work groups, and it pairs neatly with an evening in the old town.

If you want the city and not only its bars, walk it with a playing route. Here is how it works, and for team outings and larger groups we have formats on this page. Questions about dates, group sizes or routes? Get in touch. Half an hour down the Rhine, and the rival: Cologne.