The main street of Hahndorf is the reason most visitors come — a long, tree-lined avenue of heritage stone and timber buildings housing bakeries, delicatessens, craft shops, galleries, and German beer gardens. The architecture is a genuine 19th-century streetscape, heritage-listed in its entirety, dating from the original Lutheran settlers who arrived in 1839 from Prussia.
The German food is reasonably authentic: freshly baked pretzels, strudel, bratwurst, and German beer at the pub. It is commercial, certainly — there is plenty of schmaltz among the craft cuckoo clocks — but the bones of the original village are still there underneath the tourist trade. Walk the length of the street and back, stop for coffee and cake at one of the bakeries, and you have done Hahndorf correctly.