Berlin’s flourishing café culture

Brasserie Desbrosses in Berlin

It is 2pm on a Sunday at Brasserie Desbrosses in the centre of Berlin and brunch is under way. There are silver platters of delicate miniature pastries, porcelain bowls piled high with fruit mueslis, and spreads of oozing cheeses. Across the restaurant, past antique mirrors, chefs carve rare roast beef beside panniers of lobster, fresh shrimp and flaky salmon.

In the open plan bakery, children are kept busy making crêpes with help from the staff. Everyone’s champagne glasses are filled and refilled, and guests can sit here, sipping gently, long into the afternoon.

Brasserie Desbrosses, inside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the centre of Berlin, has done for brunch what Bugatti did for cars: taken the functional and turned it into a beautiful, expensive commodity. At €78, this champagne brunch is an indulgent reworking of the regular Berlin brunch, but its essence is typical. Every weekend, families and friends gather in restaurants and cafés to feast on buffets and exchange news.

The brunch business has taken off because of the staggering number of cheap restaurants here, a flourishing café culture and a communal spirit among Berliners that is unusual in a big city. Eating out is popular even on weekday mornings and most restaurants offer a breakfast menu from 9am until the afternoon.

At weekends, when many of the young party until dawn, breakfast becomes brunch, starting late and stretching out into a day of recovering and relaxing over bowls of steaming milchkaffe. A typical all-you-can-eat brunch buffet rarely costs more than €9.

Brunch is all about sharing and socialising and, despite some of the best spots in Berlin being booked up weeks in advance, nobody is rushed through. “We want people to sit here as long as possible,” says Antje Pfahl of Brasserie Desbrosses. “Everything is about making people feel comfortable.” Many cafés time happy hours to coincide with the end of brunch to keep customers in their seats into the evening.

Prenzlauer Berg, in the north-east of the city, is Berlin’s breakfasting hotspot. Once the preserve of a bohemian art scene, the area has seen an influx of young families. At weekends, they gather for breakfast in the warm, wooden interior of Gugelhof on Kollwitzplatz, which offers Alsatian cuisine alongside a wide range of other options. Prices range from €2.80 for a pastry and home-made confitures to €10.40 for the Gugelhof Breakfast, which includes duck liver mousse, marinated salmon and baked shrimp, and is best washed down with a cold glass of Crémant d’Alsace.

Berlin brunches often fuse several styles. Just around the corner from Gugelhof, candlelit Pasternak serves continental fare alongside Russian specialities, including blini platters, Russian sausage and potato pancakes from 10am-3pm on Sundays. Its sister restaurant Gorki in the Mitte district, offers a Soviet-themed breakfast menu every day until 4pm. Plumping for kitsch over Pasternak’s elegance, Gorki is home to the “Worker and Farmer” breakfast for two to share (€13.90), which includes home-marinated salmon, curd pancakes, organic scrambled eggs, fresh fruit and breads with home-made jam.

Just up the road from Gorki, Aapka offers an Indian alternative brunch. Cold dishes of salads, cheese and potatoes are served beside three different curries, usually lamb, chicken and vegetarian, for a mere €7. Further south, in the up-and-coming Kreuzberg district, Café Morgenland offers a weekend brunch with a Mediterranean twist of olives, hummus, pesto and rocket salads. Unsurprisingly, Morgenland is very popular and would-be Sunday brunchers must book well in advance.

Brunch needn’t be an exercise in excess. Berliners love their organic produce (indicated by the prefix “bio”) and many smaller coffee shops serve bircher, a delicious Swiss breakfast of muesli soaked in apple juice and served with quark, cheese curd of eastern European origin. Nearly every dish, down to the smallest pastry, comes with a garnish of fresh fruit.

The message is one of community rather than decadence, especially in cafés that still echo the old socialist principles of East Berlin. The collectively owned Café Morgenrot on Kastanienallee serves a vegan brunch every Sunday from 11am-3pm, with diners invited to pay as much as they see fit after eating. At An Einem Sonntag im August, the simple daily breakfast buffet of bread, cheese and cereal costs €2.95, with the understanding that customers will take no more or less than they need.

Whether at the luxurious Brasserie Desbrosses or the humblest of cafés, the joy of brunch in Berlin is down to one simple principle: even the best meals are better when shared.

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Details

Gugelhof, Knaackstrasse 37, 10435 Berlin, www.gugelhof.de

Brasserie Desbrosses, Potzdamer Platz 3, 10785 Berlin, www.desbrosses.de

Café Morgenland, Skalitzerstrasse 35, 10999 Berlin, www.morgenland-berlin.de

An Einem Sonntag im August, Kastanienallee 103, 10435 Berlin, www.an-einem-sonntag-im-august.de

Aapka, Kastanienallee 50, 10119 Berlin, www.aapka.de

Gorki, Weinbergsweg 25, 10119 Berlin, www.gorki-park.de

Pasternak, Knaackstrasse 2224, 10405 Berlin, www.restaurant-pasternak.de

Café Morgenrot, Kastanienallee 85, 10435 Berlin, www.cafe-morgenrot.de