Ich bin (auch) ein Berliner
Coffee with the Berlin correspondent for The Times. Lunch with the Exberliner food editor. And shrubs with the co-owner of one of the hottest bruncheries in town.
In Berlin, the city with the most restaurants (6579), 571 of the 3.76 million capital city dwellers have to share a restaurant
Frankfurter Allgemeine, April 2022
When I moved here, it really felt like the opening of a new cafe serving avocado toast was a big deal. And now it’s, like, 10 of them opening a week
Jane Silver
A Japanese pancake, a restaurant without signage and an American food writer. This is lunch in Berlin.
I’m finding it difficult to imagine a more Berlin-type eatery than the one that the food editor for the local English city magazine Exberliner has suggested we meet at for lunch. For one, I can’t find it. After wandering around Uferstudios, a dance/art complex filled with multiple warehouse-sized spaces and seemingly endless expanses of tarmac, I wind up asking the woman at the front desk of the restaurant where the restaurant is, much to her bemusement.
“It's a brand-new project from these folks that brought Berlin its first California-style brunch over 10 years ago, and the menu looks pretty bonkers,” Jane Silver writes in an email, when we’re setting up the arrangement.
Bonkers because Mexican tostadas, gnocchi, Osaka okonomiyaki, merguez and chipolata sausage, Kentucky fried oyster mushrooms and a croque “señorita” share equal billing on the mains menu. For someone whose lived experience in Germany is had largely in Wiesbaden, it’s not bonkers, it’s Berlin – a place former resident David Bowie described as “the greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine.”
Silver arrives wearing a jacket and I realise, a bit chilly in my tee, that I know nothing about the summer temperatures here. She advises that you have to be prepared for anything weather wise in Berlin, a sentiment I come to understand deeply when, in the space of a week, nippy days and grey skies give way to sweltering heat and humidity.
Jane Silver is a pseudonym and a tribute to famed Los Angeles food critic, Jonathan Gold. “I moved here from LA and LA’s food scene in 2011/2012 was just so many miles ahead of Berlin, that I felt like when I arrived here I was from the future almost. So it was really easy to write about food because you could kind of see what trends were coming.”
Items such as gourmet burgers and craft beer, for example, were just starting to be more of a thing in the German capital. “LA has so many different communities living there, and it felt that just by having lived there I was automatically kind of like more of a food expert than most people in Berlin.”
Despite the width and breadth of the restaurant landscape in Berlin now, Silver can’t say that it’s caught up with LA, describing the two food scenes as “very different”. But the attitude to eating out has caught up. “I think that really was only kind of starting to happen when I moved here: that people that weren’t in the food industry or people that didn’t have a lot of money were suddenly caring about restaurants, and talking about food and Instagramming it.
“In Europe and North America, it feels like there’s definitely this greater food consciousness. And I think the population of Berlin getting more international, for sure, has something to do with it. I think people starting to make more money so that they can actually afford to eat out as more of a hobby. Because people really weren’t making money here. I mean, a lot of people still aren’t making money here, but there was a while when nobody was.”
Silver will write about our lunch for the September issue of Exberliner. That print issue will be more Wedding-oriented, as the publication’s office has just moved to the neighbourhood (pronounced “vedding”, Wedding is off the beaten track of the typical tourist).
“I generally try to write about new, up-and-coming places. Then I look for places that not everyone is writing about, too, which is sometimes hard.”
So it’s a bit on the unfortunate side that her order is wrong when it arrives. Since she had eaten merguez sausage the night before at Chez Michel, she purposely ordered the mushroom version of the merguez sausage dish. Casting a critical eye at my plate, which is overflowing with tempeh and salad – the cabbage pancake that is Osaka okonomiyaki buried underneath – she says it looks nothing like the Japanese pancake she’s had before, but that could be because it’s difficult to identify under all that sauce.
At my urging, she has a couple of bites. “The sauce is a lot more acidic. I’m not really sure what they’re doing with the sauce. It’s almost like a vinaigrette kind of thing.”
She knows of only one other place in the city where one can get this Japanese pancake. That place is owned by Germans but is really trying to be authentically Japanese, she adds.
“It’s actually a really good way to use up leftover vegetables, if you’re not being super authentic about it,” she mentions, on cooking it at home. “As long as you’ve got cabbage, then you can throw anything else in it.”
Where does she take out-of-towners to eat in Berlin, I wonder, assuming she has a long list of favourites, classics and quirky locals spots. “The place that I always take visitors Berlin food wise for lunch is Rogacki, which is this deli where you order stuff and you have to eat standing up. Their main thing is fish but you then can also get sausage and basically all of these very old-school dishes.”
Silver’s apartment is in Neukölln, her favourite part of Berlin to live in and, often, to eat in. Gold famously wrote about the year he spent attempting to eat his way down Pico Boulevard, a major thoroughfare in LA. Similarly, Silver has eaten her way down Sonnenallee, a major thoroughfare through her neighbourhood that features a proliferation of Middle Eastern spots.
“I always take people to Turkish places because that’s something that Berlin does really well. There are places with all of these grilled meats, if you’re into that thing. Especially around Kreuzberg, Kottbusser Tor, are all of these really good Turkish grill restaurants, but then you can also get mezze if you’re wanting to stick to vegetables. Doyum, is quite good, or Adana – those are the two kind of classic ones.”
She mentions that there are people who come to Berlin just to eat vegan food because the city has so many vegan eateries compared to pretty much anywhere else. “I’m so used to every restaurant having at least one, and usually more, vegan options and it’s funny because now when I go back to the States, even in cities they only have something with cheese or with egg or something like that.”
Apart from the sheer volume of vegan establishments and Döner (kebab) outlets, there is no shortage of pizza in Berlin either, Neapolitan-style in particular. “That’s one of the biggest things that’s happened in Berlin in the past two years or so, is that suddenly there’s just too many pizza places.” Her reliably favourite pick, and it does serve Neapolitan-style, is Malafemmena in Schöneberg. “The pizza is consistent. You can tell that they import almost everything from Italy.”
The following day she’s going to a pizza festival. A bunch of Italians created a group called “True Italian”, and every so often they hold an event that a number of Italian-owned restaurants they’ve enlisted participate in.
Fancying a knockout brunch on the weekend, considering brunch as a dining-out concept is entirely absent in Wiesbaden, I ask for her picks. “Brunch is not actually one of my specialties. Where I am in Neukölln, there’s a really nice brunch place called Lonely Hearts. They do sort of British American so you can get a full English breakfast, but vegan, and then also pancakes, and they have these really good milkshakes – also vegan.”
Later she asks about the food scene in Cape Town and then remembers a brunch restaurant she’s written about where she seems to recall one of the owners is South African. “Let me find my own article about them,” she says, taking out her phone. After a minute, she exclaims, “Yes, one of them is South African!”
“Actually, if I was going to recommend brunch, it would be this place. They’re in Kreuzberg and they do really, really good brunch. The food is really good and they’re super sweet; they’re just the nicest guys.”
As befits a food critic, she’ll eat anything, Anthony Bourdain-style. “I have”, she says. “Over the years I’ve eaten a lot of food from a lot of places.” Describing an assignment that involved sampling where to eat brains in Berlin, she likened one of the dishes to “eating something from an anatomy textbook.”
“Afterwards I was trying to make sure that I didn’t have mad cow disease, even though you really can’t get that anymore.”
The Berlin restaurant scene is getting more and more interesting
Jason Starmer
Brunch in Berlin
In a city with 6579 restaurants (according to a recent report in a German newspaper), queueing for an hour for brunch doesn’t seem as if it would be necessary or desirable. Yet routinely, on weekends, that’s what the masses are doing in Berlin at all-day hotspots such as Benedict in Wilmersdorf and Two Trick Pony in Kreuzberg.
“I think queueing for brunch is a thing,” says Jason Starmer, the co-owner of Two Trick Pony with his partner, Gary Young. On a Monday at 1pm, there may not be a line to get in but there’s not a table free either. It’s not what the couple imagined when they were plastering the walls themselves, wondering how they were going to stop their money from running out before they opened.
“We thought that we would be opening a quiet little cafe. Right from the start we didn’t have the capacity to match the demand, and that’s still the case.”
Two Trick Pony, whose name is a reference to breakfast and lunch – “those are our two tricks” – is located in the far corner of Bergmannkiez, historically the academic and artistic part of the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg. It’s on a wide, leafy street opposite a row of cemeteries filled with historical figures, artists and musicians.
The cafe opened in February of 2020, 10 days before the first Covid-induced lockdown. “The timing was in our favour in a way that we didn’t anticipate at the time,” Starmer says. They converted the large window next to the entrance door into a takeaway hatch and the ample outdoor space meant diners could sit far apart. “It turned into a thing to do when everybody was locked at home with nothing to do.”
As Exberliner food editor, Jane Silver, wrote in the magazine, locals first got to know Starmer and Young by dint of their takeout pies, sausage rolls and cakes. “Through it all, their relentless niceness kept regulars coming back for more, even when word of the place spread far beyond Kreuzberg.”
Starmer says of that time that they managed to build their profile when so many other places were barely able to operate. “For a year and a half it felt like we were the only new place in Berlin, so we were who everybody was talking about because there was nobody else to talk about.”
Starmer has spent his whole working life in restaurants but Two Trick Pony is the first place that’s his. And while he loves to cook at home, he’s only ever worked front of house although he’s had an active hand in designing the menu here, both with the first head chef, who is English, and the current head chef, who is Colombian.
He grew up in Durban, South Africa, where he started his restaurant career at the Colony Restaurant from 1993 to 1995, during its heyday. In 1996, after finishing university, he moved to London. “I was only meant to be going for a six-month working holiday and I ended up cancelling my return flight and not going back.”
For 17 of the 20 years he spent in London he worked at Moro, alongside Nathan Perrin who was a chef at Moro and later became the head chef for the first year and a half after Two Trick Pony opened. “The chefs at Moro have a very rustic approach to cooking and I’ve really enjoyed food that’s not too process-orientated,” Starmer says.
He and Young, who is Irish, used to visit Berlin two or three times a year. Their godchildren live in the city and it was always a place they had spoken about possibly living in long-term.
“It is such a free-spirited and open-minded kind of place, even more so than London, I think. I think there’s something about the history of Berlin and the Wall and the opportunities it created for artistic people that has meant that as a capital city, it’s not as staid and stratified and rigid as many other capital cities in Europe. And it’s very open to new things, open to different lifestyles and it’s very much about celebrating personal freedoms while being very aware of personal responsibility, and I’ve always felt an affinity to that. But neither of us spoke German, so we were always a little bit nervous.”
While he’ll still root for South Africa in international sports clashes, and his mother and brother live there, he doesn’t consider himself South African – or British, for that matter, despite having lived there for almost half of his life and having a British father.
“I enjoy going back to South Africa on holidays, but it wasn’t for me. I’m sure it’s different now, certainly in certain areas of South Africa, but South Africa when I left in the late nineties was very conservative still. I never quite fit with the outdoorsy, sports and beach kind of lifestyle. I preferred the things that I could find in London. And I just enjoy living somewhere that’s a little bit more outward looking.
“But then, of course, Brexit happened and then we were, like, hmm, maybe the UK’s not as outward looking as we thought and we would prefer to live somewhere that’s a little bit more connected with the rest of the world. Brexit kind of forced us to say it’s now or never and I’m very glad it did because otherwise we just would have put it off forever.”
Once they made the move in 2018, for the first year and a half Young continued to work in finance while Starmer set to work planning Two Trick Pony. After finding the site, they spent six months fixing it up “very, very slowly because we didn’t know what we were doing.”
They also enrolled in a beginner German language course. “When we opened the cafe, I could have a full conversation about wiring or plumbing or any number of German building terms, but I couldn’t have a conversation with somebody about the weather. But working here, once we opened, our German started improving enormously and our customers, who are lovely, have been great teachers.
“I’ve never fluently spoken any other language but I find maybe having a very small amount of Afrikaans has given me a bit of a toehold and made it a little bit easier. Our German has always been peppered with mistakes, but we made a concerted effort to always speak German by default even though at the very beginning we could only say a handful of sentences. But, to be honest, in this kind of environment, there’s really only a limited number of things you need to say on a day-to-day basis. And then we broadened that from the basic stuff about what would you like to order and are you enjoying your meal and how would you like to pay, to now being able to do chit-chat as well.”
These days Starmer attends to administrative details and Young takes care of deliveries and the store cellar. They work service only on weekends when it’s busiest. Starmer hosts with Anke, the manager, and Young often works at the bar.
Having never worked at a daytime-only concept restaurant before, he had a “rosy” idea of what it would be like. But the economies are entirely different from a dinner service set-up as people spend less per head, which makes a brunch spot all about volume. The busy periods are also much longer than would be the case with a lunch or dinner service eatery.
“It’s six solid hours and on the weekends it’s non-stop all the way. It’s surprising that somebody who has worked in restaurants all their life failed to realise quite how hard the workload was going to be.”
The menu is a melange informed by where they’ve all worked and grown up, from the North African, Middle Eastern, Spanish, Southeastern and Mediterranean elements on the menu at Moro, which have influenced the flavours in the menu at Two Trick Pony, to head chef Julian’s Colombian background to Starmer's South African upbringing, not to mention the wide array of Australian and New Zealand brunch cafes in London that Starmer would frequent.
“I like the idea of brunch because I feel that it’s very fluid and it’s very open: we can do something that’s a bit more breakfasty and a bit more lunchy and it tends not to be as geographically defined. We can pretty much serve whatever.”
The poached eggs on the menu is based on a dish from a brunch cafe in Denmark that Young and Starmer tasted. The escalivada is a Catalonian dish (Julian was in Spain running a restaurant before living in Germany, and Jason used to serve it at Moro). There’s a porridge dish and an overnight oats dish and a toastie catering to the vegans in Berlin (“Berlin is full of vegans”). The former head chef grew up in Yorkshire so there’s always been Indian spice items on the menu. There's a not quite full English breakfast as well as the green bean achar and pineapple pickle from Starmer’s grandmother’s recipes.
“How well the customers have responded to our menus has been enormously rewarding – that undoubtedly is the best part of the job. We’ve never felt as much a part of a community as we have since opening the cafe, and then moving into the building upstairs. It has allowed us an entrance into this new country. It makes Germany feel far more like home than it would have otherwise.”
The Döner has kind of become Berlin’s symbolic dish – the two cultures have almost been married together
Oliver Moody
An Englishman in Berlin (one who does drink coffee)
“Berlin has a very strong multicultural drive. For example, this particular neighbourhood has a very large and well-integrated Turkish population, so the food’s fantastic,” says Oliver Moody.
Sitting at Coffee Pony in Schöneberg with black Americanos, this is a short walk from Oliver Moody’s flat but it’s not his local. His local doesn’t have seating though.
Every Berliner has a local Döner (kebab shop) too. As Moody mentions, the Döner has become “Berlin’s symbolic dish”. Turkish street food in general is not in short supply anywhere in the city, what with the largest Turkish population outside of Turkey living here. From where Moody’s sitting, there’s a Turkish supermarket in his eyeline.
His go-to is from a place called Imren that has an outlet on the street where he lives. It’s part of a chain that started in Kreuzberg. There the lamb for the Döner-Spieß (spit) has been cooked in milk “so it's not just some sort of random, industrial, carrot-shaped column of calf meat. It’s genuinely pretty decent meat.”
This is Berlin so vegetarians are not left out of the action and Moody almost immediately adds that there’s a great vegetarian Döner place just five minutes down that way, “but the classic one is Mustafa's Gemüse Kebap, which is on Mehringdamm in Kreuzberg.”
There’s a comparatively sized Turkish population in the bordering neighbourhood of Neukölln. “In recent years, though, I feel like its focus has switched more towards the Arab world. There’s a famous street called Sonnenallee where the Arabic population density is so great that you have sort of street signs in Arabic and really fantastic food there, particularly Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese.
“I don’t think there are that many people from the Arab world in this part of town but if you just look over there, there’s one Turkish supermarket, and there's another one just up the way. But it's very much a part of the local landscape because these guys have been here since the 1960s in some cases.”
For the past four years, Moody has been the Berlin correspondent for the UK newspaper The Times, where he covers Germany and northern, central and eastern Europe. His mother is a professional translator and German is her first foreign language (the others are Chinese, Swedish and Italian). “So I’d kind of grown up with it a bit. I had German friends from school; I’d always liked the country.”
With a desire to become a Middle East correspondent, he studied Arabic at university. “And then I lived in Damascus for a bit and realised I’d be so lost because actually it’s much nicer to work in information-rich environments where you can ask government officials questions and be hopeful that they might give you a straight answer; where you've got data to pull things out of. Working under a dictatorial regime like they had in Syria would have been pretty frustrating.”
While he raps away in German with fluency and ease to the barista behind the counter and the woman in the apartment building next door who asks for help to move her bicycle, his Arabic now is terrible, he says. “It’s just absolutely evaporated.”
He can also write in German to a more or less native level, but there’ll still be moments when he’ll be in a DIY shop, for example, and somebody will shout something and he’ll have no idea what they’re saying.
When the job offer in Berlin came through, he picked up an exam revision textbook designed for 15 and 16 year-olds, staying up till 2am each night working his way through it. He also enrolled in the Goethe Institute.
“But I’ve learned most of it on the job. You’re having to learn about the country anyway, and by far the best way to do that is to try get into the mental world of the country you’re going to be writing about. So kind of simultaneously you’re trying to get to grips with the politics and the culture, and the language kind of dovetails more easily than not doing the language.
“It also makes a huge difference which language you interact with German people in professionally, and I think that really depends on what the point of the conversation is. For the first couple of years here, I wanted to do everything in German. It just seemed it was respectful, it seems like you would get further, they would be more forthcoming with details because you didn’t have that slight wall of awkwardness of operating in a language that was not their first language.
“Increasingly, though, I’ve found that if they offer to speak English, I take them up on it because there is a kind of a looser way of interacting with people that is normal in English that really isn’t normal in a kind of German professional setting. So sometimes you actually end up getting better quotes, even more detail, in English.”
Moody describes the enormous emphasis on Sachlichkeit. “It kind of means objectivity or factiness. It’s an enormously precise language and especially when you’re dealing with politicians or academics or people in the public eye, they are extremely careful in how they formulate what they say in a way that I have not found to be the case with most people in those worlds in the UK or America.” Even in neighbourhood Whatsapp groups he’s noticed that “everyone is very facty, very sachlich.”
Moody grew up in the southwest of England near Bristol and lived in London for a long time where he met his wife. She works as a television science journalist in Berlin and is learning German (having less of a professional need to speak it). Moody was the science correspondent for The Times before he became a foreign correspondent.
“I remember when I was a kid there was a great programme called Tomorrow’s World about the scientific inventions that were going to change the future. They did a segment from Jo’burg where apparently carjackings when you’re waiting at the red lights used to be quite a big thing – I don’t know if they still are anymore – and this guy had invented a flame thrower.
“You put it in the passenger door and if somebody tries to chuck you out of your car, kind of Grand Theft Auto-style, you just push down this paddle and fire comes out. For a seven year-old boy, this was just so mad,” he laughs.
Having his two boys in Berlin has been a boon. He and his wife worked out that they’ve saved £67,000 on childcare (the system in Germany is free and very high quality, he mentions).
“Aside from that, Berlin is a wonderful city to have small children in because the population density’s not that great. You have a lot of parks; they’re really good at children’s playgrounds. Every one's got its own kind of identity; they put a lot of care into building them. They’ve got little themes: there’s a fairytale one over there, there’s a fire brigade one with a fire engine and burning buildings over that way, there’s a witches playground up that way.”
Apart from playgrounds with multiple themes, Moody reels off a varied list of places to grab a bite within pointing distance too. “There’s a really excellent vegan restaurant about a half a mile down that way to the southwest of here called Mana. There’s a good kind of Swabian joint, very traditional, called Die Feinbäckerei – the high class bakery – where they’ve still got the old kind of baking oven from the Weimar era.
“There’s a lot of good Korean food and Japanese food in this neighbourhood. One thing that’s kind of missing is just, like, modern German cuisine. Often you have to go out of your way to find it. It is out there and there’s quite a vibrant culture of that but you have to go looking for it.”
Despite all this moreish sounding nosh, Moody is cooking at home a lot at the moment. He’s newly into pickling. Sauregurkenzeit refers to a period of time when nothing happens. It’s a phrase for the part of the year when everybody’s on holiday, and the news slows to a crawl, and the newspapers start publishing silly stories. “But that’s also the time when you pickle your cucumbers because they’re in season.”
Some suiwer Saffer flavour from the South Africans in Berlin Facebook page
Dom, this was such a great read. I'm going to Berlin this year and I now feel thoroughly prepped on the eating side of things. Thank you so much for this. I'm so glad I discovered you. Are you in CT or in Germany at the moment?
Always a good read. Thank e