The mixture of influences, youthful energy and a taste for informal hospitality have made Berlin, the fourth city visited by Crozes-Hermitage after Paris, Brussels and London, one of the most interesting places to follow for foodies and wine enthusiasts. Chefs travel here from around the world and wine merchants and sommeliers thrive on its challenges. The city is therefore constantly a hotbed for tomorrow’s talent where the major and minor venues of the future emerge and new trends are born. Follow our guide.
Tim Raue
He is probably the best-known and one of the most enterprising German chefs. The owner of the two-starred restaurant of the same name, he is currently renovating La Soupe Populaire, his Prenzlauer Berg annex that he has dedicated to Berlin cuisine.
Star chef Tim Raue has now defected to the East after growing up in a working-class district of former West Berlin, where he spent his early years skipping school and replacing theory with real life experience. He admits that he spent very little time in college and preferred cooking. All types of cooking. “I am a gourmet food hybrid”, he confesses. “I get a lot of inspiration from Thai, Japanese and particularly Cantonese cuisine. And of course, I am also influenced by French cuisine. Ultimately, my dishes are neither Western nor Asian but somewhere in between”.
In 2007, after being voted chef of the year by Gault & Millau and becoming the recipient of his first Michelin star for Le 44, he decided to succumb to his yearning for the East. “I now have four restaurants but the heart and soul of my cooking is at the Tim Raue which I have opened up to Asian influences”. La Soupe Populaire, his latest venture, opened at the start of 2017. Conversely, Tim Raue only serves Berlin dishes inspired by his grandmother there.
In each of them, wine is of paramount importance. “Wine is my only hobby outside of cooking”, admits Raue. At the Tim Raue, the wine list features approximately 1,200 growths. “I am very traditional. Half of our wines are French. Our sommelier focuses on regions such as the Rhone Valley, so we have twenty or so red and white Crozes-Hermitage wines, especially the finest years – 1961, 1978 and 1990. Some of them are among the best wines I have ever drunk in my life!”
Interview by Fanny Steyer
Sebastian Koch
The actor starring in The Lives of Others, Die Hard 5, Homeland and Bridge of Spies loves Berlin and wine, so we talked to him about both.
Berlin
He knows the city like the back of his hand, all its foibles but also its beautiful stories. He should – he grew up with the city where he arrived in 1989, just as the Wall fell, and signed his first contract with the prestigious Schillertheater. “I have experienced 27 years of incredible development in Berlin and feel as if I was a part of it”, he says proudly. The reason why he accepted a part in the fifth season of Homeland with Claire Danes was because the series was filmed in his home city. “It really was a dream to be able to act in my city for six months!”
Wine
“Oddly, my love story with wine began with white wine that I encountered in South Africa in 1996. It was only afterwards that I discovered the marvellous German wines”, he admits. For reds, though, he prefers the expertise of French wine growers. “I love French reds, their power, depth and tannins. They are incomparable. I am a fan of Bordeaux but am still discovering magnificent new regions. The Rhone Valley is one of them”.
Marie Raymond
Happy Street Food
Street food is an intrinsic part of Berlin. Here is our guide to the best street food markets and most prominent diners or ‘imbiss’.
Street food goes back a long way in Berlin, a city known for its ‘imbiss’ or traditional diners where you eat outside on the pavement, and for its mobile sausage sellers. It is also, of course, the capital of the doner kebab, a speciality imported by Turkish immigrants in the 1970s.
But with street food as with everything else, Berlin has a knack of reinventing and updating things. Some of its diners have become ultra fashionable eateries or haunts of the in-crowd where people throng to taste the burger that’s the talk of the town or savour a currywurst.
However, the most striking trend is the rise in popularity or even boom of street food markets. Street chefs from a huge variety of backgrounds meet up either regularly or at random for some colourful demonstrations offering a wonderful array of flavours and smells, some of which even prompt a concert or an exhibition.
Blogger Elodie Benchereau, who scours the city’s secret or unusual venues for the Good Morning Berlin website, has drawn up a non-exhaustive list of them.
Berlin’s new faces
The German capital is home to an upcoming generation of young chefs and sommeliers to rival those in other major European cities.
Born either in Germany or outside the country, many a young chef and sommelier converge on Berlin, attracted by the spirit of a city that rewards enthusiasm. Here, they find young natives who, like them, are citizens of the world and full of positive energy.
The result is a plethora of venues, restaurants and wine bars, the finest examples of which offer the most diverse array of influences. They replicate the German capital’s multicultural dimension and creative juices in the glass or on the plate.
“In Berlin, the gourmet food scene moves along at breakneck speed and the public is very open-minded. For a chef, that is extremely exciting!”
Gal Ben Moshe
