Spouse and I will be in Berlin for 1st time in early July this Summer for 3 days and nights. Looking for casual one star equivalent restaurant recos. Heading on to Paris for 18th visit. Favorite recent bistros in Paris include, e.g., Le Comptoir, Paul Bert, L’Ami Jean, and Chateaubriand so this should give you an idea of the type of place I am looking for, if you have been to both cities. Also could use WELL LOCATED hotel recos in Berlin.
We stayed at the then brand new Ritz Carlton on Potsdamer Platz several years ago and liked it very much. Great hotel, great location.
Suggest you contact Berlin board member Martin Zwick.
Fo Restaurants:
Rotisserie Weingrün Gertraudenstraße 10-12 10178 Berlin http://www.rotisserie-weingruen.de/ Only Rotisserie dishes. Very good for grilled meat when you are tired of the heavy restaurant experience. I like this place.
Rutz weinbar. Great wine list - elegant “modern german” food. Casual fine dining. http://www.rutz-weinbar.de/ In the mitte which is the groovy arty area.
Lutter & Wegner Weinhandlung Carlottenstrasse 56 10117 Berlin Oldest wine merchant in Berlin (since 1811). They have an amazingly deep DRC list which is cheap on any measure. Be careful as they have another 5 or so outlets at different addresses - only go to this one. Wood panels. Ok but not great food. In fact VERY ORDINARY FOOD so only go for the wine. after your DRC at Lutter & Wegner cross the road (it’s directly opposite) for a scotch at the Helmut Newton named “Newton Bar” - can’t miss it with the wall of nudes ! Get a little Berlin colour here.
Hartmann Restaurant Fichlestr 31 Berlin Kreuzberg Chef run - won Berlin masterchef 2008. Small and friendly - OK wine list. Try some spatburgunders !.
No KaDeWe take away?
KaDeWe has an extraordinary food hall but it is a department store. If you need a present for young children it has the biggest stuffed toy bear collection you can imagine.
I was last there in March 2007. We stayed at the “Hotel Melia” on Freidrich Strasse in the Mittel section of Berlin. I really can’t recommend this place enough (at least back then, may have changed since). We booked it through Expedia for maybe $110-120 USD per night. It is rated as a 3 star hotel but it was at least a 3 ½, maybe a 4 star hotel based on their rating system. It was a former office building renovated into a hotel. Nice spacious room for a large city setting, clean and modern. Full services such as fully equipped room (including a Bede), two restaurants, bar, free Internet access, work out facilities, etc…. Mostly the location can’t be beat. We were maybe 10 steps from the U-Bahn (subway), half a block from the S-Bahn (above ground trains) and perhaps .6 KM from the main Banhof. More important we were two blocks from the main historical street of Unter den Linden. Many of the notable historical sites and all major museums are off of this street and all within easy walking distance. I wouldn’t hesitate to stay here again.
One of the better casual dinners we had was at Ganymed. The restaurant is “French” cuisine but in my opinion it leans itself more towards “French Country with a slight German influence”. It is directly across the river from the Hotel Melia on the Shiffbauerdaum (along the north side of the river). Dress is business casual in my opinion. Anything between a sport coat and slacks to just slacks and a button down shirt works in my opinion. The food was very good and fairly reasonably priced. The wine list is International with not any depth per se. It is however serviceable. You should be able to find something to accompany your meal at what I recall to be reasonable prices. We had a traditional cassoulet which was very good and true to form. I had the advertised ginger-carrot soup and it was very good. Everything we had was very good and the service was very well done. I’d definitely recommend trying this place.
Probably the most formal dinner we had was at Aigner. The food was billed as Austrian and it was very good. Wine list was quite good with many German and Austrian selections. Thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it.
{bump}
Wife and I will be visiting (with our infant) in a week. I’ve read all the Berlin threads on the board; I’m bumping this one just in case anybody has any new suggestions. Would be interested in recs. for restaurants as well as sights; obviously, with the infant, fancy restaurants are out of the question.
Went to Berlin last weekend, and used suggestions from here and Wine Pages. Thought I’d comment on them.
Went here for our Sat. dinner. Both my wife and I enjoyed the food (she got the salmon; I got the veal chop), and the wine list was adequate (we had a bottle of 2007 Jurtschitsch - Zobinger Heiligenstein Riesling, which was quite nice). Really, my veal chop was excellent — flavorful, and cooked perfectly. It did not appear to be only rotisserie dishes on the menu, btw.
Monsieur Vuong
This Vietnamese restaurant was our Thur. evening dinner. Wine list was hardly a list — 5 selections total, iirc. Luckily, the Riesling we ordered was cheap and quite delicious. Food was excellent (deep-fried shrimp roll; wontons; pho). This place doesn’t take reservations, and it was hopping when we arrived. We big-time lucked-out on getting the table we did. Service was genuinely fantastic.
La Soupe Populaire
Friday lunch. This may be the weirdest restaurant location at which I’ve dined. If not for a local who saw us walk-up to the extremely non-descript entrance, my wife and I may have never found this place. The interior is quite unusual, too. My food was o.k. (Berliner meatballs), and my wife’s food was excellent (baked cod, iirc ---- it was definitely some kind of fish). Apparently, President Obama dined here during a visit to Berlin — unfortunately, he had the same meatball dish I did. Wine list was adequate/good; my wife had a glass of dry Riesling that is bottled exclusively for the restaurant (it was very good to low-level excellent) and I had a German Sauvignon Blanc that was good.
Hotspot
This Chinese restaurant was our Sunday lunch. Fantastic wine list, with many aged Riesling goodies (we went with a '94 Christoffel Urziger Wurzgarten Auslese **, which was decent). Food was decent, but nothing to write home about. Their spicy scale goes from 0 to 4 (with all dishes marked as 4 being accompanied with a warning to the effect of “this dish is VERY hot”); my dish was a 3, and was barely spicy at all.
Bumping - any new great restaurants in Berlin. looking for casual as well as fine dining. Anyone tried Pierre Gagnaire’s place at the Berlin Waldorf-Astoria, Les Solistes?