Sell gastronomy in Dortmund.

A restaurant space must suit the concept technically: extraction, grease separator, cold storage, toilets and power capacity.

Outdoor seating, opening hours, noise and permitted use matter too. If nothing fits, submit a search brief.

Dortmund's gastronomy leasing market is shaped more by neighbourhood dynamics than by a single prime pitch, and it lacks the published broker rent series available for office or retail. The clear demand anchor is the Kreuzviertel, the city's leading bar and bistro quarter, where dense Wilhelminian housing and a large student population sustain steady evening trade and where street-level units are tightly held with low churn. The historic core around Alter Markt and Westenhellweg delivers high daytime footfall but is rent-sensitive: brewery taverns and system formats dominate the best frontage while independents are pushed to cheaper side-streets. The Saarlandstrassenviertel offers a settled neighbourhood scene at lower rents, and the regenerated Phoenix-See waterfront in Hoerde has become the city's principal destination-dining location, trading strongly in fair weather but exposed to seasonal swings and higher fit-out burdens. Reliable city-specific gastronomy rents are not published by the major brokers, so the figures here are indicative estimates anchored to retail benchmarks and local listings rather than verified prime rents. Westenhellweg ground-floor retail, a proxy for the most expensive F&B frontage, sat around EUR 165 per square metre per month at its last clear reading and has drifted lower since, underlining that pure 1A retail levels are uneconomic for most independent operators. Outside the core, street-level F&B units realistically transact in the low-to-mid teens to low twenties per square metre, with waterfront new-build at Phoenix-See commanding a premium. The dominant near-term policy event is the permanent cut of dine-in food VAT to seven percent from 1 January 2026, which improves margins for food-led concepts even though beverages stay at nineteen percent. Combined with rising city-centre retail vacancy that is freeing former shop units for conversion, this creates genuine opportunities for tenants in 2026: affordable, characterful space in a market that favours occupiers. The principal risks remain cost inflation in energy, wages and food, and cautious consumer spending in a soft Ruhr-area economy. On balance the leasing market sits in early recovery, friendliest to disciplined owner-operators targeting the Kreuzviertel fringe, neighbourhood quarters and converted centre frontage.

vat dinein: 7 % VAT on dine-in food from 1 Jan 2026 (Germany-wide; drinks remain 19%); high street prime rent: 165 EUR/sqm/month indicative ground-floor prime retail Westenhellweg (proxy for prime F&B frontage; ~2022 level, declining since).