Eating Berlin: In search of delicious and unpretentious food

Berlin doesn’t immediately spring to mind when you think: foodie citybreak. But it should and this is why, says Sean Russell

New food capital of the world? (Getty/iStock)

It’s Saturday and the sun is high in the sky and it’s lunchtime. You’re in Berlin and you’ve spent the morning cycling parts of the Berlin Wall, visiting the suitably underwhelming Führerbunker and the far more impressive Topographie des Terrors. You have nowhere you need to be, nothing you need to do.

You spot a small currywurst place and order Menu 1 – currywurst with chips and a beer – and you sit at a wooden table outside with two Germans who are quite happy for you to join them. You eat the rich sausage slathered in tomato ketchup and dribbled with Worcester sauce with a sprinkling of spicy curry powder tossed on top. As you lift your beer the lady at the table says “Prost” and you say it back and take a nice cold sip.

Despite every sad thing that’s happening in the world – and after your depressing but moving morning of sightseeing – everything feels right in your world. Everything is as it should be in that moment. Peace has been achieved. Full enlightenment. Life is… some unpretentious, greasy food and a beer at an outside table in the sun.

OK, so Berlin probably isn’t the first place that springs to mind when you think of a foodie city. Nor Germany in general. You know about wurst, and sauerkraut and you also know that Berlin is home to the doner kebab. So what? Is that haute cuisine? Is it a delicately slow-cooked ragu? Well, no it isn’t. But eating in Berlin is wonderful and it’s cheap – it is not some aspirational, arty fare but an everyday thing. A beer will set you back around €5 on average but in some not so off the beaten track places as little as €3.20. Currywurst, as eaten above, costs about €7 with chips and a beer and that’s at an expensive place. Trust me when I say there’s a lot more to Berlin than wurst, schnitzel and white sausages.

I arrived in Berlin with two lists. One was of historic places I wanted to see, another of foods I had to eat. I stuck rigorously to the former, wandering the length of what remains of the Berlin Wall while listening to The Rest is History podcast episode about it, but I somewhat abandoned my food list once my friend, a native Berliner, steered us off-piste.

A currywurst and beer meal sets you back €7, and that’s at the expensive end of the spectrum (Sean Russell)

Sure, I could go to the traditional-but-declining eckkneipe, small corner pubs where old men gather at the counter to drink good beer and chat sports and read newspapers… or I could go with Milo to Kreuzberg to where young Berliners actually drink.

After a cycle on a rickety, part-broken bike through a dark park we arrived in the so-called student area, full of little bars and places to eat. We found a dingy looking bar and ordered a couple of bottles of beer (€3.20) and took them to the worn-out old sofas at the back. The place was packed with young Berliners, and I say Berliners because it seems anyone from anywhere can be a Berliner, not just Germans. People smoked inside and drank cheap beers and the whole place was far more relaxed than anywhere I’d ever had a drink with people my age in London. It made me realise what a dearth of cheap, dive-like bars we have in the UK and what a shame that is. Dive bars are democratising places young people can have a long night of drinking without spending a fortune, where they can chat and smoke and not worry about whether they’ll be able to afford food that week.

This place in Kreuzberg represents the new – the Berlin that is now famous for its all-welcome nightlife and clubs. But I was still desirous of the traditional. And so the next evening we went to Max und Moritz, an old Berlin ballroom of a restaurant founded in 1902 and serving proper old-style German food. It was wonderful.

Berliner eisbein: too heavy in summer, perfect in winter (Sean Russell)

I knew exactly what I was going to order: Berliner eisbein. Eisbein is pork knuckle, usually simmered to utter tenderness – soft, tasty meat served on the bone with boiled potatoes, sauerkraut and perhaps some of the nicest mustard known to man. I have just one complaint, that it was the tail-end of summer and this very much felt like a winter dish. In the depths of December, perhaps after the Christmas market and a few paper cups of glühwein, this meal would basically have sent me into euphoria, especially eaten alongside a stein of Berliner Kindl, a delicious golden lager. I am sure I would never have wanted to leave the restaurant.

Alas, in the still-warm end of summer, it was all a bit too heavy. My fault, and teaches me about stubbornly sticking to a list regardless of environment.

Out with the old, back in with the new. Milo tells me one thing Berlin does that few people talk about it Vietnamese food – and it does it well. They tell me that a lot of Vietnamese people came over in the 1950s under the controversial Gastarbeiter programme due to East German labour shortages. Many of these communities still exist in Berlin today and that’s why the pho, particularly in the small ma and pa cafes, is fantastic and should not be missed.

Braised beef with hand-stretched noodles at Wen Cheng in Schönhauser Allee (Sean Russell)

We also went to a Chinese restaurant called Wen Cheng in Schönhauser Allee for fried chicken bao buns, and braised beef with hand-stretched noodles. Was it as good as Milo said it would be? It was up there with some of the best London can offer, without the extortionate price tag. We had to queue for about 30 minutes to get in but there’s a reason people are queueing and that’s because it’s worth it.

Yes, I had a doner kebab, which was lovely enough and lacked the grease of its London cousins. Yes, I had frankfurters. Yes, I drank copious amounts of wonderful lager (better than Munich’s if you ask me). No, I didn’t pay much for any of it, and yes I was extremely happy there. I was at peace drifting from historic place to historic place, stopping for food and beers whenever I felt like it, sitting outside and watching the city go by. I loved how completely unpretentious it all was. It was all simply delicious, like everything was right in the world for just a moment.

Maybe Berlin isn’t what you think of when it comes to foodie getaways, but it should be. The only bad thing was I had to leave.