Drifting and eating in the capital
Trying to be a flaneur in Berlin
Back in January 2022, myself and two friends made a trip to a small diner off a B road out of Berlin. After four or more hours of waiting there, we were towed back to the city by the German equivalent of AA after our car broke down. I also contracted coronavirus that day. Such are the perils involved in conducting research for a potential book project. The topic was nostalgic dining in (and around, in this first instance) Berlin. Tobias Beck is a German chef (and owner of Ember, an open-fire dining concept where I have previously worked) who is committed to both leaning into and confronting some of the preconceptions people have about German cuisine. Jonas Kolahdoozan is an Iranian-German director of photography and a longtime collaborator of Tobi’s. The three of us have, over the last year and a half, been to a handful of restaurants, diners and delis that represent the old guard of Berlin dining.
There’s a famous quote that Berlin is “damned forever to becoming and never to being.”1 Where the food scene is concerned, that doesn’t seem to be true. Berlin does not yet rival other European gastro capitals but the landscape is starting to resemble something serious. I have had the opportunity to meet and work with a handful of talented people at the forefront of this change over the past few years. Having only moved to Berlin in late-2019 however, I have to rely on my forebears to gauge just how different the city that I live in is from its younger incarnation. Apparently, even a decade ago, one would struggle to find a decent meal in Berlin. This perhaps provides some insight into why the gastronomy scene in Berlin feels more collaborative and convivial than cutthroat: a rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. Sibling rivalry on all fronts. When one person or institution strives to attain a higher quality, it forces others to catch up and do the same—and Berliners are slowly detecting the benefits of such healthy competition on their plates.
The idea for a book project came out of an acknowledgement that amidst all this change there will inevitably be loss. Even when something essential or desirable is gained in advancing towards another state, what we lose in the process is not necessarily undesirable. German food doesn’t have much cultural clout: it’s stodgy and beige (like much of a traditional British diet) and frankly, just not very sexy. Yet much of our understanding of German cuisine (and German culture generally) is coloured by wartime grievances. I choose to see German food in the same light as popular British institutions such as the greasy spoon fry-up, a pub roast lunch, or fish and chips by the seaside. Honest sustenance; often regional, often cheap, it can be delicious or it can be inedible. Had we wanted to undertake a similar project in a city in France or Italy, it would instantly be conferred with more romance—but it is already so incredibly overdone. We were aiming for a tongue-in-cheek response to such preconceptions, rather than truly attempting to change anyone's mind. Nevertheless, classic German food remains food that comforts and brings people together, is loved (and would be sorely missed if it disappeared entirely), and crucially, it is food that people commit their lives to cooking and serving.
When setting out, selection criteria for our project largely (with notable exceptions) came down to us visiting a place and thinking: how on earth has this managed to survive this long? The places that are dying out in Berlin and might not live to see many more decades of progress. We aimed to extend a polite tipping of a hat to the previous generation, while being part of the machine (for better or worse) that moves everything forward. In the era of Instagram and food porn, the places we visited stood out for their resistance to pressures to conform. Their business models have at their heart the notion that you don’t need much to come away feeling full. Pretty maverick and grid-immune.
To really understand German cuisine, you’d have to explore regionally. But we limited the scope of our search to Berlin (or just outside of it), taking (like all arrogant city-dwellers) the capital to stand for the whole, as most regional influences can be felt somewhere here.
Though we never held fast to a singular idea of what our project could be, it became clear as time went on that we were all getting different things out of our research. In truth, as neither a chef nor a native German, my role has always been that of the outsider who was brought along for the ride. I like my food and I do my research, but the specificity and depth required for food writing—diving into the history and science behind any given produce or plate—was not what I found myself drawn to. The essays I was inspired to write upon visiting these places welled from a different impetus.
Mainly, I had thought I would write about food because that was the opportunity in front of me. Being surrounded by passionate people is bound to rub off on you a little. But this didn’t really stand up to scrutiny: what I was actually looking for was a way to connect to the city I had moved to. With any great love affair, though you (typically) haven’t known your lover their whole life, you seek to intimate yourself with all their shadowy versions, and fill in any blanks in their narrative for yourself. I already knew that I loved Berlin, but even now, nearly four years in, I can’t help but feel as if I’ve barely scratched the surface.
In psychogeography, a term coined by Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955, the figure of the flaneur lost or drifting through a city is central. Debord and his acquaintances would purposefully get lost in a city in an attempt to understand urban space in the light of desire rather than habit. One way they experimented with this was to hike through the Harz region of Germany using a London map as a guide. This is a pretty neat summary of how it felt to move abroad just before a pandemic hit: I was relying on a London map to steer me around a graffitied forest. My days consisted of a lot of drifting, walking and stomping around Berlin. Lunch and dinners with Tobi and Jonas helped to redraw some routes for me—connecting me not only to the place I now live but also to my German heritage.
Franz Hessel, the original Berlin flaneur, gives a description of how to aptly play the part in his 1929 book Walking in Berlin:
The flaneur reads the street, and human faces, displays, window dressings, cafe terraces, trains, cars, and trees become letters that yield the words, sentences, and pages of a book that is always new. To correctly play the flaneur, you can’t have anything too particular in mind.
Taking that last line as creed, I went to these places ‘without anything too particular in mind’ and tried to note down what I observed and connected with. Even without having anything particular in mind, I still often felt like I was failing in my attempts by some unknown metric. So much of anthropology (and connection in general) depends on language. There is a discernible lack of other voices in my essays, which I feel to be a loss. Being confronted with the limitations of my German language skills, I have been forced to write more introspectively than I intended.
My existence in Berlin is contained within an “expat” bubble. There is such a specific connection made between people who have come from the same place, but who have all, for one reason or the other, needed to leave behind where they came from. Building a home from home with these friends has been the making of me. Yet I am not blind to how this contributes to creating a parallel society in Berlin, and how ‘[we] don’t need to think along local lines at all, because [our] whole existence is only temporary.’2
I’m not for a second trying to congratulate myself or position going for some nice meals with a few German friends as assimilation. As an attempt, it is lacking compared with, say, taking intensive language classes. But it was somewhere to start. Some acknowledgement, however implicit, of the fact that ‘culinary knowledge is a reaching towards the other, an acknowledgement that our relationship with that which lies beyond us is what will nourish us’.3
Recognising that these essays aren’t strictly food writing but something more personal, I was hesitant to share them anywhere at all. I contended with all the usual doubts about whether or not I had anything worthy to contribute—and then I decided that taking the time to express yourself is maybe a worthy enough contribution in and of itself. Enter substack. There’s some freedom I feel in not trying to commericalise this writing; in it not having to fit within a clearly defined project. The name of the blog is potentially somewhat misleading in light of this. But I like it, so it’s staying.
Though the essays are personal, their roots in a collaboration are obvious to see. Tobi and Jonas will be reappearing characters in these essays. And Jonas has been kind enough to let me use his pictures too.
So some notes of thanks are due:
Every time I have contended with doubts about my writing, I have looked at Jonas’s pictures and felt spurred on. They remind me that we put hours aside to meet at regular intervals, sought these places out, and turned up without any sense of an outcome—just in pursuit of exploration for exploration’s sake. Jonas has a wonderful eye. He has found the beauty in the quirkiness of the places we have visited and the food they have offered.
And I need to thank Tobi for all the things he has shared with me and introduced me to; the nastiest, most delicious foodstuffs I ever did eat—but also some of the people I care most deeply for in this world (hi Claire!).
Lads, I’ve really enjoyed the lunches, dinners and drinking. Please can we go out again soon?
In her book Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, Rebecca May Johnson (editor at Vittles, one of my longstanding Substack subscriptions) dedicates 188 pages of lyrical prose towards dismantling notions that writing about cooking is an unserious endeavour. The conclusion she ultimately reaches is one that I find bolstering in its simplicity. In the end, she says ‘I have written down what I have been doing in the kitchen because it is what I have been doing.’ It’s in a similar spirit that I will share some of the essays I have written, perhaps monthly, most likely in chronological order of the places visited. They are stories of instances where I have gone somewhere with a hunger and been lucky enough to come away feeling a little more full.
The critic Karl Scheffler said it in his book Berlin—ein Stadtschicksal in 1910.
Englis(c)h in Berlin: Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society, a conversation between Moshtari Hilal and Sinthujan Varatharajah (2022).
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, Rebecca May Johnson (2022).
💖 already keen for next month!!
I really enjoyed reading this and love the idea of a flaneur in Berlin.