Trial in Hamburg: With your finger in the tomato sauce

Despite his white coat and clipboard, the man in the video somehow doesn't look like a food inspector. And yet the snack bar operator lets him have his way as he first dips a finger into the large container of Bolognese, then licks it off and then puts it back into the sauce. Because of such alleged controls, 33-year-old Frithjof N. has been standing before the district court in Hamburg since Friday.

He is said to have published videos on the Internet under the name Langlebepapa in which he is said to have repeatedly posed as a false food inspector to Hamburg snack bar operators. In this way he gained access to their kitchens and storage rooms and carried out alleged checks there.

He is then said to have uploaded material of these fake hygiene checks to his Instagram and Tiktok channels, but did not sufficiently pixelate and anonymize his alleged victims. Specifically, it is about at least ten of these alleged checks that he is said to have carried out in the past year, including in snack bars on Veringstrasse, Talstrasse and on the Shoulder Blade.

The allegations are official presumption, violation of the confidentiality of the word and violation of the Art Copyright Act. It is not his first such visit to this court. In June of this year, the Hamburg district court sentenced him to a fine of 3,000 euros for posing as a false food inspector.

But even after the verdict, Frithjof N. apparently continued to publish videos on his channels. Sometimes on a horse farm, sometimes as a supposed electrician in a gas station. In contrast to the previous videos, this time everything was agreed upon and the people shown were actors, he assures.

Whether that is true will play a role at the next hearing on November 13, 2026. The judge has commissioned a police officer to investigate the locations and circumstances of the recordings in more detail until then. N. announced that he would take action against the June verdict. In order to finance the legal costs incurred, he launched a call for donations.

His Gofundme page entitled “When Truth Needs Lawyers” has so far raised 37,139 euros. The original donation goal of 26,000 euros was quickly increased to 45,000 euros after the first sum had been reached by his supporters. On the donation page he writes: “I built this community because I say things that others often don’t dare to say.”

You can hear him explaining what these things are in a street survey conducted by the Hamburg influencer Benabin. When asked why he carries out the fake checks at all, he answers with a grin: “Those from the Far East are often dirty pigs too.” It's actually noticeable that many of his control videos were filmed in Asian snack bars.

This also applies to the one that can be seen in the courtroom on Friday. Wearing a white coat and armed with a clipboard, Frithjof N. rushes a snack bar employee through the store. After introducing himself as Benjamin Blümchen, he points to two containers in the refrigerator: “Is that chicken meat or pork meat do you need that?”

In doing so, he uses a particularly crude, racist cliché: that of the Asian person who cannot pronounce the “sh” and simply turns “meat” into “Flei”. He then has the snack bar employee stand up straight and uses a thermometer to measure the temperature of the man's forehead, then his back and finally his buttocks, while he harshly instructs him to stretch his arms to the side.

He ends with the sentence that sounds conciliatory in a poisonous way: “It’s all good, but brush your teeth.” Many of these videos will be shown in the courtroom on Friday. But the judge's interest isn't just in them. Today, and especially on the next hearing date on November 13th, it will also be about the influencer's finances.

The sentence to which Frithjof N. was sentenced in June can normally be used quite well to draw conclusions about his financial situation: He was supposed to pay the 3,000 euros that N. was sentenced to in 150 daily installments of 20 euros each. The amount of a daily rate is generally based on the monthly net income, divided by 30.

The court calculated that N. had a monthly net income of only 600 euros. For an influencer who has over a million followers on Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube, this is a surprisingly small income. Now the judge announces that the next appointment will focus in particular on several cash deposits into his account and the money from the Gofundme campaign.

Doubts also arose as to whether N. actually lives at his registered address in North Frisia. No hygiene products for men were found during a house search. It also becomes clear in the courtroom that something may not be entirely clean here.

Frithjof N., who confessed, initially appeared remorseful on Friday. He speaks quietly and carefully and, through his lawyer, has the injured parties who appear as witnesses in the courtroom offered 1,000 euros in compensation. And when he personally apologizes to the witness Nguyen, he says: “When I see you sitting here like this and see how much it affects you, then I’m really sorry.”

But all of that falls apart when the public prosecutor asks him why he suddenly closed his channels on Instagram and Tiktok on the Wednesday before the trial began: "My mailbox exploded with mail, I don't want my life to be about paying fines. The channel no longer brings any joy."