There is an advantage to opening a restaurant in Berlin. The relaxed indifference (to put it politely) many locals seem to have towards good food and the scarcity of competition mean the slightest effort usually meets with ecstatic reviews. There is little point, therefore, in setting Tim Raue’s new venture Ma, which opened this summer at the back of the mammoth Adlon hotel, against the city’s own benchmarks. The question is: how does the most anticipated opening in Germany this year compare to the best Germany can offer?

The answer: not badly at all. Raue, a Berliner who has forged a reputation as the wild man of German cooking has grown in stature since Restaurant 44, in the city’s old west, where he had been performing his culinary experiments before moving on late last year.