Berlin, or the Newest Old Food City in Europe

There is a stretch of pavement of perhaps two hundred metres along Kastanienallee, in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, where you can eat lunch four times, in four different national traditions, without ever crossing a road. A Vietnamese pho place with a queue outside. A Turkish döner shop with the meat turning slowly on its vertical spit. A stand-up currywurst counter under a striped awning. An Italian espresso bar with cornetti and a proper machine. This is not, in any deep sense, unusual. This is what a Berlin street looks like.

You can spend two weeks in the city and never eat a plate of what would once have been called German food, and eat extremely well. You will also notice, gradually, that almost nothing you have put in your mouth was in Berlin a hundred years ago.

This is not a defect. This is the point.

Berlin is a young capital by European standards. It became the seat of a unified Germany only in 1871, was flattened at the end of the Second World War, and divided down the middle for the next forty-five years. It has been broke for most of its existence — famously so under the DDR in the east, more quietly so in the walled-off western half — and even after reunification, the phrase "poor but sexy," coined by a former mayor in 2003, held roughly true for another two decades.

For all these reasons Berlin never developed a bourgeois cuisine of the kind that defines Vienna or Paris. There was no long unbroken succession of court chefs, no golden age of the hotel dining room, no century in which a wealthy middle class could refine an idea of how one dines here. What Berlin has instead is a food culture invented in the last seventy-five years, mostly by people who had just arrived, mostly for the purpose of being eaten quickly, cheaply, and outside.

It is, unglamorous as this sounds, one of the most honest food cultures in Europe.

Berlin currywurst from a stall.

The founding story of modern Berlin food is that of Herta Heuwer, who ran a snack stand at Kantstraße 101 in Charlottenburg in the years after the war. In 1949, according to her own later testimony, she obtained ketchup, curry powder and Worcestershire sauce from British soldiers stationed in the western sector, mixed them together, poured the result over a boiled sausage, and sold the combination at her stand. She trademarked the sauce, which she called Chillup, in 1959. By that point the currywurst was already a Berlin fact. Konnopke's Imbiss, at the Eberswalder Straße U-Bahn stop, claims to have introduced the same dish to East Berlin in 1960, using ingredients acquired through more complicated channels.

The currywurst is a genuinely postwar dish. It did not exist, could not have existed, in the Berlin of 1938. Ketchup was not available in Germany at any scale before the Marshall Plan; curry powder was a British colonial import. The dish is a specific product of the occupation years — of what Berliners could get their hands on, and of what happened when they combined it with the boiled sausage that was already there. It has become, in the seventy-five years since, the dish of Berlin in a way that is almost impossible to argue with. There is a currywurst on every corner. There is a running argument about whether the sausage should be with skin or without, sliced or whole, which is conducted in Berlin with the same seriousness that the Neapolitans reserve for pizza dough.

Dönner kebab meat on a plate with salad and French fries.

The second founding story is the döner kebab, and it is essentially the same story with different ingredients. Turkish workers began arriving in Berlin from 1961, when the Federal Republic signed a labour recruitment agreement with Turkey. The döner they knew from home was a plate of sliced meat with rice, salad and a piece of flatbread on the side — a sit-down meal, eaten with a knife and fork. Somewhere in the early 1970s — most accounts credit Kadir Nurman, who ran a stand near Zoo Station and started selling the dish this way in 1972, though at least one other Berlin Turk claims priority — someone stuffed the meat, the salad and the sauce into the folded flatbread and handed it over the counter as a portable sandwich.

That sandwich is the döner as most of Europe now knows it. It was invented in Berlin by Turkish immigrants adapting a Turkish dish to a Berlin habit, and it then travelled outward — to the rest of Germany, to France and Spain and the UK, and eventually back to Turkey, where the sandwich form is now sometimes called, with a small grin, the "German döner." Berlin currently has more Turkish residents than any city outside Turkey. It also has, by some estimates, more döner shops per square kilometre than Istanbul.

After the Wall came down in 1989, Berlin acquired a second immigrant food culture more or less overnight. East Berlin had contained, since a 1980 agreement between the DDR and communist Vietnam, a substantial community of Vietnamese contract workers, brought over for state factories and largely kept out of view. When the wall fell and the DDR collapsed, most of them stayed. Their children now run the pho places on Kastanienallee, the bun cha counters in Lichtenberg, the banh mi shops in Prenzlauer Berg. Berlin has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in Europe, and one of the deepest Vietnamese restaurant scenes.

The result, geographically, is a city with two overlaid immigrant food maps. A Turkish one runs west to east through Kreuzberg and Neukölln, densest around the Landwehrkanal and the Türkischer Markt on Maybachufer, which sets up on Tuesdays and Fridays and is the best market of its kind in continental Europe. A Vietnamese one runs north-east through Prenzlauer Berg and out toward the Dong Xuan Center in Lichtenberg, the vast Vietnamese wholesale market that has quietly become one of the most consequential food distribution points in the city. Neither of these communities was in Berlin a lifetime ago. Both of them now define what a Berlin lunch tastes like.

The rest of the food culture is arranged around a particular institution that Berlin has developed to a level of perfection unmatched anywhere else in Europe: the Späti. The Spätkauf — literally "late buyer" — is the small twenty-four-hour corner shop that sells beer, cigarettes and basic groceries, and it is the physical anchor of Berlin's outdoor drinking and eating culture. You buy a Sterni or a Berliner Kindl at the Späti, drink it on the pavement outside, eat something from the döner shop three doors down, and continue like this from about seven in the evening until roughly the hour at which most other capitals have long since gone to bed. Berlin has organised itself around eating outside, standing up, at any hour, from paper, cheaply, and in company. There is no equivalent tradition in Paris or London or Rome. The restaurants exist — some of them are excellent — but the restaurants are not really the point. The point is the pavement.

What of the older Berlin food?

It is still there, mostly. Bulette — the Berlin word for what other Germans call Frikadelle, a large flat pan-fried meatball — is served in the older bars and Kneipen of the outer districts. Eisbein, the enormous boiled pork knuckle with sauerkraut and pea purée, appears on the menus of the surviving traditional institutions. Königsberger Klopse — meatballs in a caper-and-lemon cream sauce, from the vanished Prussian capital — is a Sunday-lunch dish in the more traditional households. Berliner Weisse, the sour wheat beer that Napoleon reportedly called the champagne of the north, is drunk with a shot of green woodruff or red raspberry syrup, and is one of the few genuinely local beer styles in a country full of them.

This is all real, and all worth eating. But it is not really where the city's identity lives now. The genuine expression of Berlin, the thing you eat in order to understand where you are, is more likely to be a currywurst from a stand under an S-Bahn arch, or a döner from a Kreuzberg shop where the counter staff shout your order back to the grill in a mixture of Turkish and Berlinerisch, or a bowl of pho on Kastanienallee at ten o'clock on a wet Wednesday night.

What Berlin proves is that the food of a city does not have to be old to be genuine. It has to be actually eaten, in quantity, by the people who actually live there, over enough time that it has developed its own local character. Everything else is prestige. Currywurst is seventy-five years old and it is entirely Berlin. Berlin döner is fifty years old and it is entirely Berlin. Pho on Kastanienallee is thirty-five years old and it is well on its way to being entirely Berlin.

There is a particular integrity in a city that eats what its actual population actually eats, without pretending to a tradition it never had. Berlin lost a great deal in the twentieth century, and it has not tried very hard to invent a compensating fiction about what it used to be. It has, instead, quietly built a cuisine out of what has arrived, in the last three-quarters of a century, from Turkey and Vietnam and the ration truck. Which is, when you think about it, roughly how food cultures have always been built — only usually over rather longer periods, and with rather more effort put in afterwards to obscure the process.

In Berlin the process is still visible. That is what makes it, in its unfussy and slightly stubborn way, one of the great food cities of Europe.