Joggers follow the Reichstagufer along the banks of the Spree, with the ever-present sight of Berlin’s Fernsehturm (TV Tower) on the skyline
See how Berlin gets through its day on a city food tour and beer tasting
A SYMBOL OF BERLIN, THE BRANDENBURG Gate is hard to surpass. Born out of royal pomp, and scarred by war, it was blocked off for 38 years by an infamous wall, its very purpose denied. But since 1989, a generation has grown up free to follow the rising and setting sun through its arches. You don’t have to push your imagination far to see openness and resilience embodied in the stone portal; for Samantha Reidie though, the same qualities are enshrined in a paper plate of chopped-up sausage, slathered in a piquant tomato sauce.
‘Currywurst is the food of the people,’ says Samantha, an ex-Londoner who moved to Berlin seven years ago and now leads Bite Berlin food tours around the city. Outside a hole-in-the-wall shop, she tells the modern legend of Herta Heuwer, a food vendor in the rubble of late-’40s Berlin, who traded alcohol with British soldiers for ketchup and curry powder. These she mixed into a sauce for good old German pork bratwurst, served with chunky potato fries, and soon she was selling the dish up to 10,000 times per week. Today, Berliners get through 133 helpings a minute. ‘I think it’s a very special dish, because it represents how Berlin rose from the ashes,’ says Samantha, holding aloft a disc of currywurst on a wooden fork. ‘People used whatever resources they had available and in this case it was food fusion too.’
Berlin’s eating habits have not just been swayed by a dubious British take on Indian spices. As Samantha ducks into shops and eateries for more tastings, she picks out other strands in the gastro-historical tapestry: French Protestant Huguenots exiled to Berlin in the 1680s and a Vietnamese community built up since the 1970s – from a once-divided country to a once-divided city. In a typically Berliner kneipe (pub), Samantha orders Rotkäppchen – though this sparkling white wine comes from a company that started in 1856, it is strongly linked with East German times, when it was one of the few prestige brands in that country and one of even fewer that are still going strong today. Most patrons though, prefer to toast with a drink that has older roots. Samantha points to the Roman writer Tacitus, who said of German tribes: ‘A liquor for drinking is made of barley or other grain and fermented into a certain resemblance to wine. To pass an entire day and night in drinking disgraces no-one.’
Food tour guide Samantha Reidie pours out a glass of the classic local tipple, Rotkäppchen
Bite Berlin (food tours from £36pp; biteberlin.com)
Currywurst: Berlin’s guilty pleasure. FAR LEFT AND LEFT Vietnamese cuisine has a big presence in the capital
The civilised approach to beer in Berlin today is to pair it properly with food, as chef Ben Pommer has done at BRLO Brwhouse, an industrial-looking space by the railway tracks at Gleisdreieck. The venue will have to move in about two years to make room for new buildings. ‘That’s why we decided to build it out of shipping containers,’ says Ben. He brings out a flight of five beers of increasing darkness, and in front of each a small dish containing a two-bite taste pairing, from an apple slice atop Granny Smith purée to go with an almost cider-like Berliner Weisse, to fermented black garlic that picks up the smokiness in a Baltic Porter. ‘Munich might be famous for beer, but its tastes are quite conservative,’ says Ben. ‘Berlin is for sure the craft-beer hotspot in Germany.’
Also more typical of the German capital’s 21st-century lifestyles is the restaurant’s vegetarian-friendly menu.
In an inversion of standard practice, meat is relegated to the back page. ‘We do things to our vegetables, such as fermenting, smoking and dehydrating, to get the full flavour out of them,’ says Ben. ‘For beer, taste is like two graphs: one is time and the other is intensity, so we try to aim for that with the food that we serve with it.’
STAY
Amid the stately avenues of the western Charlottenburg district, Sir Savigny is just over a year old – the hotel’s eclectic style mixes mid-century modern lounge furniture, cut glass and velvet, with a breakfast room-cum-lobby that doubles as a library filled with art books (from £115; sirhotels.com).
BRLO Brwhouse (meals from £16, beers from £2.70; brlo-brwhouse.de)
‘This is one of the last East German products to survive the fall of the wall’