5 Foodie Finds in Berlin

Not surprisingly, our trip to Berlin revolved around food – mouthwatering, bigger-than-our-eyes sandwiches; oddly curry-flavored, ketchup doused currywurst and creamy, cheesy pastas.

And I have to say Berlin truly surprised me with its vibrant food scene! We ate our fair share of currywurst, local cheeses, Turkish snacks at this Turkish Markt as well as modern hipster dishes and drank enough German beer and unknown liquors during our long weekend visit. 

Here’s a roundup of my Top 5 Foodie Finds in Berlin:

1. Beer & Currywurst Tour

Generally, we aren’t huge fans of organized tours as we prefer to do our own thing. However, once I read about the Original Berlin Food Tour featuring tasty beers and currywurst, I knew we had to sign up. We met up with the tour’s friendly founder Bastian Schwithal and four British couples. We started off with locally made currywurst from a small stall in the Alexa Shopping Centre. As the night progressed, I honestly couldn’t see what the fuss is all about currywurst – German-made sausages doused in ketchup and curry powder. But we had a good crew, Bastian told us funny tales and the food and beer kept coming.

Beer and sausages - definitely a fun combination!

The main brewery I remember is Brauhaus Mitte located near Alexanderplatz where we sampled 4 different beers, including a wheat, pilsner and a dark one. The night may have gotten fuzzier after this tasting especially after we tried some strange, green-colored shot.

This is one organized tour that I can definitely recommend!

2. To-Die-For Truffled Pasta!

I love Italian truffles, so once two of my expat friends here in Warsaw told me about this fabulous truffled pasta they had in Berlin, we had to go too. Ristorante Via Condotti, Fasanenstr. 73, in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood was a 20-minute metro ride from our hotel. As soon as I saw the pasta being prepared in a giant Parmesan cheese wheel, I knew we had to order this dish as our entrée.

The waiter rolls up with the cheese cart, adds some hot cream into the well, scrapes some cheese into the mixture, pours in brandy, lights the whole concoction on fire and then tosses the tagliolini with the creamy cheese sauce. Then, he slices the truffles extravagantly all over your plate of pasta!

This dish was a bit on the expensive side at €25 (about $35) per person, but I think it was worth every penny.

3. Hipster Farmers’ Market

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I love visiting markets when we travel! We popped into Markthalle Neun, Eisenbahnstraße 42, to check out its Saturday’s farmer’s market, which features a variety of stalls selling fresh fruits and veggies, American BBQ, locally-made cheeses, German wines, colorful flowers, forest-harvested mushrooms and more.

Originally built in 1891, Markhalle Neun is one of only two historic market halls being used as a public food market in Berlin and one that miraculously survived two World Wars. The local producers display their wares on Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., at the time of this writing.

If we hadn’t just eaten breakfast, I would have loved to have tried Kantine 9 at Markthalle 9, which serves a rustic two-course menu sourced from local farmers for only €8 (about $11).  

You can read more about Markhalle Neun from my French blogging friend, at Cuisine de Provence, with her blog post, entitled: Another Berlin Foodie Hotspot.

4. Locally-Sourced Breakfast

Before we visited the above-mentioned farmer’s market, we popped into Welt Restaurant Markthalle, Pückler Street 34, for breakfast. This rustic restaurant, located next to the historic market hall, opens at 10 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The menu changes weekly and features nouvelle takes on German and Austrian staples as well as a fantastic selection of breakfast choices. We both ordered the German breakfast that included local Black Forest Ham, eggs and delicious dark German bread.

I would have loved to come back here and have a drink at the lovely, Mahogany-stained, wooden bar.

5. Bigger-Than-Your-Head Pastrami Sandwiches

Oddly enough, I ate THE best pastrami on rye sandwich I’ve had ever outside of NYC during our weekend in Berlin. I had read about the chic café called Mogg & Melzer, Auguststraße 11-13, in an article in Food & Wine last year, and marked it on my foodie to-do list. This crowded café is located inside the newly revived Jewish Girls’ School in the hipster Mitte neighborhood. Hubby and I waited for a table and then both ordered a large, handmade, loaded pastrami sandwich and savored every single bite.

If you’re a displaced New Yorker like us, these pastrami sandwiches will make you feel like you’ve landed back in a Jewish deli in NY. In fact, I’m still salivating over these sandwiches as I write this blog post!

(Funny enough, we ran into Bastian as we were leaving this café, which made us feel like we definitely were on the up and up of our foodie finds in Berlin.)

Even though fellow travel-savvy friends had raved about the food and art scene in Berlin, I didn’t believe them until I experienced it all first-hand. We will definitely return to Berlin and hopefully soon!

Smacznego!

There are many pre-WWII buildings like this one in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin.

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The Berlin Wall in Photos

For about 28 years, Berlin was a divided city with a 12-foot concrete wall establishing its boundaries.

Following World War II, Germany was divided, as was the capital of Berlin. The United States, Great Britain and France, who had similar government beliefs, occupied West Germany and West Berlin. East Germany and East Berlin were occupied by the Soviet Union. In those early years, thousands of people began migrating from the East to the West due to the government's restrictions and economic hardships. To prevent losing more of its population, East Germany established the Berlin Wall in August 1961.

The original cinder block wall with barbed wire morphed over the years into a concrete block, 12-foot-tall wall with a rounded top starting in 1975. Armed guards were stationed by the wall to prevent escape to the West. However, an estimated 10,000 people made escape attempts, with only half of those attempts successful, and 246 people died because of the Berlin Wall.

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall finally fell. (Read a personal account of the wall falling here.) I was 13, and only vaguely remember catching glimpses of this moment on television.

24 years later, I saw the remains of the Berlin Wall in person. Staring at these decaying concrete sections was a sobering moment. I realized how often I’ve taken my American freedom for granted.

A 200-meter-long strip of the border wall (outer wall), severely damaged by souvenir-seekers, is still standing at its original location on the southern side of Niederkirchnerstraße in Berlin.

A “prettier” section of the wall is known as the East Side Gallery – a 1.3 km-long painted stretch of the former Berlin Wall along the Mühlenstrasse in former East Berlin. It is the largest open-air gallery in the world with over 100 original mural paintings. International artists transformed these grey, ugly walls into pieces of art that recognized the liberation and peace following the wall’s fall.

I highly recommend a stroll by the East Side Gallery for any first-time visitor to Berlin.

One of the best known paintings, “The Mortal Kiss” by Dimitrji Vrubel, of Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev’s mouth-to-mouth embrace.

In November on the West side of the wall, there was a special photo exhibit, called WALLONWALL, about walls that separate people worldwide.
This photo shows West Bank, Israel.

Locations:

The East Side Gallery

Mühlenstraße (near Oberbaumbrücke)

10243  Berlin 

Corner of NiederkirchnerStrasse/Wilhelmstrasse
A 10-minute walk from Checkpoint Charlie or Potsdamer Platz

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Tasty Temptations at a Turkish Market in Berlin

If I closed my eyes and listened to the market sounds around me, I easily could have been transported to one of my weekly pazars in Istanbul.

Instead, we were in the midst of the bustling Friday market day at the Türkischer Markt in Berlin, Germany. In November, we spent a long weekend exploring this former divided city for the first time. Visiting this Turkish market was one of the highlights for me as I still get bouts of homesickness for my beloved Istanbul.

Here at the market, I found Turkish simit and pide, green and black olives galore, beyaz peynir and other varieties of cheese, pickled veggies, prepared Turkish mezes, fish mongers, meat sellers, pomegranates, mandalina and a plethora of fresh produce.

The market even had a small section that looked exactly like the backstreets of Eminönü with its bolts of fabric, thread, yarn, boxes of buttons and çay glasses and teapots. I saw head-scarved ladies haggling over their purchases just like they do in Istanbul.

Even though I know many, many Turks live in Germany,
I was still surprised to see so much of "Istanbul" here in Berlin.

Just hearing Turkish being spoken made me giddy! And anytime I spoke to one of the sellers in Turkish, I got surprised reactions that this blonde-haired yabanci could speak Turkish AND that I was not German. To make the conversation easier, I told the sellers we still lived in Istanbul and were on holiday.

Buy why indeed was I buying Turkish olives and cheese if I was on holiday?

As I’ve mentioned before, I love visiting markets wherever we travel. While planning this trip, I heard about the Türkischer Markt and couldn’t resist booking a hotel about 2 km away so we would be close. My husband indulged my plea to visit this market when he would rather have been exploring historical sites.

However, husbands everywhere should know that: happy wife = happy life. And I was happy!

If I had more luggage allowance, I would have smuggled back more Turkish delights.

But I was content with my few purchases and reveled in each and every bite of my crispy cheese and spinach gözleme.

A slightly different version of Turkish gözleme, but still tasty.

How to get to there:

The Türkischer Markt is open year-round from 11:30 a.m.-6.30 p.m. on Tuesdays & Fridays. It runs along the south side of the Landwehrkanal from Kottbusser Damm. One of the entrances is located at the intersection of Kottbusser Damm and Maybachufer.

Address:

Maybachufer

12047 Berlin (Neukölln)

Transit: U8 Schönleinstraße

At another end of the market, local hipsters gathered to listen to live music.

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