Looking for German Food in Berlin

I very frequently get asked (usually by people in my tour groups), “So, do you travel around Europe a lot?” And my answer is always the same: “Not as much as I’d like.” Granted, the Country Boy would probably beg to (vociferously) disagree, but I definitely don’t jet set as much as 19-year-old me thought I would when I first moved to France. Which is how it took me until 2015 to visit Leipzig and until this year to (finally) make it to Berlin.

As someone with German heritage, I was kind of expecting to revisit some of the classic foods of my youth when dining in restaurants, particularly sauerbraten (which I actually first tried at, um, Epcot Center, please no judgment) but swiftly fell in love with. But here’s the thing: if you want to eat classic German food, Berlin isn’t really the place to go.

That isn’t to say that Berlin doesn’t have good food (more on that tomorrow), but the heartier Bavarian fare that people usually associate with Germany (sausages and spatzle and the like) is actually better sought out in Munich than in Berlin. (Berlin’s specialty, if you believe the signs we saw pretty much everywhere we went, is currywurst.)

That said, there are a few places where you can get good “classic” German food.

The first spot we tried was the Alt-Berliner Wirtshaus, admittedly touristy as it’s just next to the Brandenburg Gate. That said, there was nothing to complain about as far as food was concerned: I went for the “giant meatball” that lived up to its name and somehow managed to be crisp on the outside and still tender and moist inside. The fried potatoes were fine (a bit greasy), and the ambiance here evoked that truly Bavarian feel.

Since I had a hankering for some sausages that weren’t covered in curry-flavored ketchup (I feel like I’m missing something as far as this flavor is concerned), we also paid a visit to Restaurant Sauerkraut. I tried the weisswurst or white sausage, a delicacy that is the key to a pretty famous piece of family lore: my brother, after a year of eating pretty much nothing but deli turkey, proclaimed on Thanksgiving that he would rather have weisswurst. My grandfather, who hailed from a very German family, was so proud that he made it happen, despite my mother’s “one dinner for everyone” rule.

The weisswurst at Sauerkraut were quite good, served in the aromatic broth in which they were cooked, with a side of sweet potato fries and roasted potatoes, as well as a small bowl of the namesake sauerkraut.

My aunt-godmother-eternal-travel-buddy opted for the Wiener schnitzel, served with a side of potato salad.

For me, however, the winner was the restaurant we visited on our last night in Berlin: Spatzle & Knodel. Named for two typical German side dishes, the restaurant served one of the best, most tender sauerbraten I’ve ever eaten, alongside homemade spatzle and very, very good red cabbage. All in all, a successful outing.

(Made all the more successful by the fact that our closest table neighbors were twenty-year-old French students, the male of which was trying very hard to impress the female by telling her all about medieval Christianity. She was less than impressed.)

Alt-Berliner Wirtshaus am Brandenburger Tor - Wilhelmstraße 77, 10117 Berlin

Restaurant Sauerkraut - Weinbergsweg 25, 10119 Berlin

Spatzle & Knodel - Wühlischstraße 20, 10245 Berlin