German food can be hard to find in Berlin…read more
You can find German food at Prater Garten.
Prater Garten has a double distinction.
Outdoors, it has the oldest biergarten in Berlin.
Indoors, it has an upscale German restaurant of distinction.
The biergarten is not my style.
If I am going to spend all day sitting outside drinking beer,
I want the location to be outstandingly beautiful.
Prater Garten's Plain Jane courtyard doesn't cut it.
The indoor restaurant though is a different story.
This is the traditional German restaurant of your dreams.
The Gaststatte was the culinary peak experience of a month of serious Berlin eating.
* * *
Prater Gaststatte looks just the way you would expect a German restaurant to look.
Dark woods. Wainscotting. Cream walls.
The menu for both food and drink are limited, although they do change seasonally.
This means that they make the same dishes over and over and over again.
They have brought them to a high level of perfection.
They only serve three beers at Prater Gaststatte, beers they brew themselves.
I have no doubt those beers are wonderful.
However, Prater Gaststatte had the Holy Grail of what I had come to Germany looking for
Artisanal German Schnapps and Artisanal German Distilled Spirits.
Bars in Berlin just don't carry those.
Prater Gaststatte had a curated selection of six.
(Actually a curated selection of five. The sixth item was a traditional Czech rarity.)
Indiana Jones had just found his treasure.
German Spirits are strong. Judiciousness limited my consumption to three.
I went with
a Nordhauser Doppelkorn,
a Dirker Hasselnussgeist and
a Stahl Birnenschnaps.
Doppelkorn is a German alternative to vodka. It is 76 proof, just slightly weaker than a traditional vodka. It can be made from any of five different grains, but the rye-malt combo is the most common.
The Nordhauser is an eminently superior alt-vodka - consummately smooth yet full of taste.
I could have done a string of those happily.
The Dirker and Stahl were both schnapps: hazelnut and pear respectively.
I have never had a beverage like the hazelnut schnapps.
It was not a liqueur. It was a strong brandy. Nothing sweet or cloying here. It was commanding like a brandy but smooth like the Doppelkorn. The hazelnut taste was overwhelming. It was as baritone and nutty as an Amaretto.
An utterly unforgettable beverage.
I stuck my neck out by going with a pear brandy.
Most pear brandies are awful.
I had had one and only one in my life that was good, the Finnish product Xante. Nothing is as good as Xante. Xante tastes like the canned pears served in heaven.
But the Stahl Birenschnapps impressed.
Nothing cloying. A real fresh pear taste.
I was a very happy guy.
* * *
Note that although my beverages were outstanding,
The food was even better.
Given the quality of my distilled spirits, that last sentence is saying quite a lot.
Never mind the strawberries I had for dessert.
It is the beginning of strawberry season in Germany,
And my meal had been so substantial that anything other than fruit would have been a crime.
Spring is asparagus season in Germany.
German restaurants will have one third to one half of all the dishes be asparagus dishes.
I ate my fair share of mediocre asparagus dishes elsewhere in Berlin.
The cream of asparagus soup at Prater Gaststatte is utterly to die for.
Nothing tastes more like asparagus than that cream soup.
And good cream soups are one of the fundamental pleasures of life.
However, the headliner act which blew me away was their Brandenburger Pork Chop.
A Brandenburger Pork Chop is a thick double-cut pork chop.
The only way to get a "good" pork chop in the United States is to go to a steak house and pay steak house prices. American steak houses typically cheat by cooking it in apple juice so the pork chop gets caramelized. You eat well, but you are still covering up a ho-hum pork chop.
This was a we-don't-have-to-hide-under-anything superlative pork chop.
Yes there was about a tablespoon of red cabbage on top of the pork chop. It was like a maraschino cherry on top of a huge slab of meat.
That pork chop had nothing to apologize for.
It was a magnificent piece of meat.
Easily a third of it was outer fat - outer fat that had been broiled to perfection.
The pork chop fat was the star ballerina.
The pork chop meat was the male dancer holding up that ballerina in a romantic pas-de-deux.
It was the absolutely perfect pairing.
(Anyone who uses that pork chop and ballet to make a joke about "Swine Lake" will be thrown off Yelp permanently.)
Suffice it to say, I liked the meat course.
Accompanying that was the potatoes au gratin of your dreams,
And the green beans with bacon of your dreams.
I never wanted to wake up.
* * *
If you come to Berlin,
Come to Prater.
Skip the Biergarten.
Eat at the Restaurant.
Deutscheland, Deutscheland Uber Alles!
