Berlin, City of Contradictions…and Delicious Food

I checked into The Adlon Kempinski, a grande dame of a hotel looking out on Berlin’s famed Pariser Platz and Brandenburg Gate. It’s not only stately and gilded, but an incredibly comfortable place. Everything works. The flowers are perfectly arranged and changed every day. There’s the pleasure of an epic shower. All the fixtures have weight. From my Pariser Platz Suite—two bathrooms, a living room, walk-in closets, marble tubs, champagne and caviar—I could watch the little swirls of activity around the Gate, the tour groups, the protests, the embassy happenings, and once even I saw great globs of falling snow (in June!) 

With the post-war division of Germany in 1946, the Brandenburg Gate ended up in the Soviet Sector; when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the gate was inaccessible to both locals and visitors. After President Reagan spoke his famous words—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—in 1987, 100,000 thronged the square for the official reopening of Brandenburg Gate in 1989, a symbol of a finally reunited Berlin. 

The Adlon has its own glittering history, from construction in 1907 by Lorenz Adlon (a cobbler’s son) at the sinus-clearing sum of 17 million gold marks (400 million euros, adjusted for inflation). In the 1930s, it became the “Little Switzerland” of diplomacy and, in the ’40s, the Nazi SS chose it for their victory celebrations. In 1945, it served as a hospital for wounded soldiers (groans heard constantly in the halls), before its 1957 sale to Berthold Kempinski, a wine merchant, hotelier, and restaurateur, and its most recent overhaul in 2016.

One afternoon I sat down with Reto Brändli, the 34-year-old firebrand chef of Lorenz Adlon Esszimmer, the hotel’s Michelin-two-starred fine-dining restaurant. The first thing I wanted to know was where he saw himself in the Berlin food scene. 

“I don’t fit,” he said. “[The other restaurants] are cooking super regional, super ecologic ... and my style is, in the end, classic French. I’m using products not just from the Brandenburg area, but from all over the world. What’s important to me is the quality.”

Over coffee—black, no sugar—he told me he has a girlfriend who travels a lot—they both travel a lot—and, having come up in classic Swiss kitchens, they have lots of chef-friends with Michelin stars who make a point to try each other’s food all over the world. Together, he and his girlfriend dote on Hugo, their little white dog. There are women in his kitchen, as well as men. His favorite ingredient is citrus. And he’s allergic to servers who launch into a “story” about every dish. 

“For me,” Brändli said, “it’s super important that it’s not a huge story. For me, the dish has to speak.” 

Germany has strict labor laws, which have changed fine-dining kitchens like Brändli’s, mandating a 40-hour work week. 

“When I was a young chef,” he explained, “I worked around 100 hours a week. I started between 5 and 6am in the morning and finished at 2am at night. I slept two hours, five days a week, sometimes six. But now we’re looking at it through a different lens. My [team] is working a four-day, 40-hour week. I received my first Michelin star at 27, my second at 29. It’s super difficult for me to tell them that, in the 10 years between 17 and 27, I was working three times more than they are now. I think something is lost but, in the end, I’m super happy we’re living in 2024. When I was a young chef, we were slaves and now, in the team, the atmosphere is more like a family.”

Brändli is both a throwback and an incredibly talented outlier. He’s old school in the purest sense, and yet also modern because of his spectacular technique. In the exquisite dining room, with its massive oak fireplace and view of Lady Brandenburg herself, the staff buzzed with a palpable pride. Hans-Marin Konrad, the enthusiastic sommelier, said at one point, “I want you to experience the glory of this wine.” (It was indeed glorious.) Which brings me to Brändli’s food.

Perhaps the most memorable dish was one of the world’s most expensive shellfish, a wild-caught Portuguese caribinero or scarlet shrimp, plated with mango, salty coconut ice cream, and kaffir lime as an homage to Thai food and the prawn’s inherent sweet nuttiness. And then there was the exquisite Poltinger lamb, from a German producer who sells only to restaurants he personally chooses, paired with white asparagus, black garlic, salty lemon, and bok choy. For dessert there was a complex buckwheat honey cake with sweet potato, white beeswax, and mead. Sublime.

During the rest of my time in Berlin, I learned two German phrases that turned out to be applicable to every part of my life. One was Alles es kaput, from a bad-humored Uber driver struggling with roadblocks. We stupidly applied it to dinner, meaning, “Yes, we were finished,” at which the waiter laughed, saying we’d said “We were broken.” We subsequently got to talking about American politics, and very much agreed that, yes, alles es kaput. The other indispensable phrase was a sandwich order—ein falafel mit salatten bitte—because, without standing on a street corner with tahini sauce dripping down your wrist, you haven’t really experienced Berlin.

The art in this city, of course, is magnificent, from the Anthropology Museum to the fantastic Neue Nationalgalerie. Their Gerard Richter exhibit was spectacular, and so was the museum’s speedboat race through the eras of modern art, organized by decades and complete with a film clip from Milos Forman’s Hair. The Museum of Murdered Jews was a bracing shock—the banality of evil—though you had to admire the city’s determination to acknowledge and atone (we could do more of that). The Berlin food scene was also completely understandable to Los Angelenos craving veggies and small plates. 

At Café Frieda I sat by the window, slurping down fat oysters from Brittany and drinking a magical orange wine. Café Frieda is one of those perfect neighborhood restaurants like Via Carota in NYC, Septime in Paris, or Kismet in LA. Samina Raza, co-owner with Ben Zviel, treats it as her living room, strewing it with the kind of book selection that makes you wonder whose brain curated these, from Our Bodies, Our Selves, to John O’Hara poetry, to Noma in Kyoto. And the vinyl collection is just as good, to say nothing of the food and the crowd. 

Afterward we went for a walk in leafy East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, admiring the little park: Berliners take their playgrounds very seriously; the complicated wood structures and play huts look right out of fairy tales. Nearby streets had yoga studios and apartment buildings with banners announcing their co-op status, while young dads took bike rides with their kids. 

On another night we went to Osmans Töchter (Osman’s Daughters) owned by Lale Yank and Arzu Bultu, two Turkish sisters who beautifully reinterpret old faves with a light and flavorful touch, also making the point that this food is prepared by women all over the world. 

Kink, another gem, was almost unfindable, existing as it does in a theater courtyard accessible only by steps. Once there, we found a plaza shaded by trees and a multileveled former brewery / now restaurant. With their lab for all things fermented, distilled, cooked, and infused, the Kink-sters are vegetable whisperers. I had a miraculous plate of potatoes and the thick white asparagus that is a spring obsession everywhere in Europe. The waiter must have liked us too, because he handwrote a list of clubs for us—though it might have been a joke, because the guy in the coat check told us they were all fetish bars and, to be completely transparent, we might not be pegged as fetishers right off the bat. 

Then there’s the clubs. The one where you can’t enter without taking off your pants, the one with a literal beach, the spa that has a football-field-sized hot pool with underwater speakers and DJ booths. There was so much, and we didn’t even begin to cover it all. In the end, though, there was something über-cool about experiencing the famous scruffiness of Berlin from the comfort of a classic hotel that did everything right like the Adlon. It felt like a two-in-one.