Barra Berlin

At Barra, a restaurant in a ground-floor, one-bedroom-apartment-sized space just east of Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld, last Wednesday, I had a meal among the best I recall having in a restaurant in years.

The night before, after picnicking in Templhof — it’s 877 acres of former airfield, minimally altered — drinking weißbier, eating butterkäse and strawberries, and playing rummy, we’d gone in search of dinner. Barra sits near the bottom of Schillerkiez, an idyllic residential neighborhood nestled between the east side of the park and busy Hermannstraße, and I’d saved it on my list of restaurants at some unknown point in time. But they were “full for the night, sorry;” I made a reservation for the following evening.

(This would never, it’s worth noting, have been possible in New York — the restaurant would’ve been booked out for at least the next 9 days. They’re only open, by the way, 18:00 to 23:45 Montag to Freitag.)

We dined instead at Caligari, a lovely little Italian spot two blocks away where we’d dined in November with a friend and a random patron; he was one, we were three, and there was only a four-top left. We split a salad and ceviche to start, Emma had risotto (truffles shaved atop), and I had lasagna (white, crisped in the broiler, slightly sweet), a bottle of Prosecco, dessert was a mint panna cotta with raspberry jam and coconut crumble, steps above the sum of its parts. A good meal and limoncello with the bill, natch.

When we arrived at Barra the next day, at 20:45, it was direct from five minutes short of four hours at the spa — no textiles allowed in the pools — via a 55-minute cross-town bus to a two-stop subway ride.

We were ushered to the back room (four seating areas: two tables out the front door, a few in the front room, four seats at the bar, two in the back (an eight-top and a four-top)). We were to eat at the four-top, my back to an open window. A warm summer night, it would soon start raining, shredded droplets blowing sideways on my back; pleasant, suited the mood; our server soon closed the window (for twenty minutes or so, until it stopped raining; it was still hot inside).

The server had come to Berlin via Melbourne, spoke only “restaurant German,” and did a lovely job; we were an easy table, surely, spa-fresh on the last night of our trip, primed for joy. And this, really, is the content of all you’ve read thus far: we were primed for joy so that the food, which we knew would be good, was all the better; the opposite of puffing a cigarette immediately before biting into some subtly flavored morsel.

Chenin Blanc was the wine, via Emma’s situating our tastes to the server — there would be a twisted Sauvignon Blanc sidebar a few courses in, but let me not get ahead of myself.

Focaccia to start, still warm, a perfect olive oil for dipping, olive oil that tasted like I’d never tasted olive oil before. Half a dozen oysters would follow, topped with a seaweed jelly. The effect was to boost the normal marine salinity of a good oyster like a sneaker wave — more potent than you’d expected, but only ankle-high; no danger, just a shock. Three each was the right amount; to consume any more, the amount of jelly per bivalve would’ve had to’ve been halved.

Monkfish croquettes in an “herb mayonnaise” next, just two, ordered because they were menued not as a dish but as “each 4€,” too tempting. And they were nothing novel, but perfect — light, warm, soft, the surplus sauce quickly cleaned up with that focaccia.

No dish, close though they came, could top the next: seven raw “fjord shrimp” atop a bed of mussel purée in a cold, shallow saffron broth. Whether or not, twenty years from now, I’ll still recall this dinner as among the best in this period of my life, I will recall how the mussels melted on my tongue, how the shrimp glistened at my bite; the dish was a camera, a photograph.

A second pair of wine glasses hit the table, our Melbourne-borne server splitting between them one glass’ worth of this Sauvignon Blanc that, allegedly, was not quite there when his colleagues opened the first bottle two years before, but was quite there now, though a bottle would’ve been too much, but we had to pair it, said he, with the next dish: girolles and ceps — a mushroom dish — in some foam whose solid origin now escapes me, nesting an egg yolk. And whether or not we had to pair the two, there was no choice, really, and the wine was colored a raw citrine, light struggling to bend through it, tasting of hay and cellar, of tortured apricot, and paired, yes, for life with the mushroom dish, as earthy and visceral as were the girolles dragged through warm yolk.

Sheep ricotta agnolotti next, 11 of them in cream and oil, peppered, savory bonbons with a bite like chocolate at room temperature on a summer afternoon, in spoonfuls of that silken broth, a delight, and now we come to the final dish before the coda, wild boar loin in a cognac sauce, sidecar of green bean salad, Thai flavors, cilantro and fish sauce; unexpected but welcome, a dish that knew its place as not the pinnacle but as a gentle landing towards dessert. Balanced, comforting, just right.

We again turned to the Melburnian for beverage recommendations, a Madeira by Francisco Albuquerque for her and an Amaro, local, by Thomas Neubert, for me. These to be paired with dessert — Emma could not resist the Colton Basset (a fudgy Stilton) with linseed cracker and rhubarb mostarda, just as I could not resist the cherry and almond cake topped with cherry kernel ice cream. I’d not had a cherry in at least a year, but if you’d asked me in the moment, I might have said six, such was the stonefruit’s vigor in this dish, warm in the cake and cold in the cream.

And then it was to Villa, our favorite bar, for one more radler, then home, for one more night in our rented flat in the trees, but first a stop for a 5€ doner kebab, the fifth I’d had that trip and uncommonly beefy in flavor where the others had been balanced by gemüse, soße, and their being veal or chicken. I could not get enough, chasing flavor, burning the final moments of a trip just long and short enough to leave us satisfied in wanting more. An Underberg to end the night.

I posted four photos of the meal on my Instagram story. The last one was of the cherry dessert, with the text “@barra_berlin top 5 restaurant meals of my life” overlaid. A friend replied, “I doubt it.” Banter, sure, but I thought about it.

Was it the food? Was it the five sessions in saunas of various temperatures and humidities that afternoon, the cold plunge? Surely, all I sweat out heightened my sense of taste. Was it the pure joy of being across an ocean with my partner, sharing it all in love? Was it the rain blown in through the courtyard window? Was it the man who came in draped in a keffiyeh, singing into a microphone attached to a small amplifier, waving a Fujifilm instant camera, who Emma paid to take our picture (twice)? Was it our new-to-Berlin server, the music I had’t hear in years playing as we walked in, Against All Logic’s “This Old House,” the familiarity of an ingredient-driven, small-plates, progressive wine program hole in the wall — was it that the muscles of this restaurant could’ve been grafted onto the bones of another in New York, or some other global city, seamlessly, the restaurant being conceptually international even as it focussed on local ingredients?

A seasonal small-plates restaurant staffed by at least one Australian pouring a considered-but-sometimes-risky beverage program; truly, we could’ve been in New York, in San Francisco, in London. These restaurants, and I’ve been to plenty, can easily be no more than the (lovely) sum of their (lovely) parts. But a restaurant, a meal, a moment is a mirror filled and flavored by its inhabitants, be they girolles and fjord shrimps, be they an Aussie expat, be they two young Americans on holiday.

It was a moment I spent, full of life and what and who I love, and this detail-burdened essay can only give a skeletal impression of what it was to live it; you’ll never know how good this meal was, nor will I, really, ever again, only the echo, but I know I’ll have another this good in time; I’ll make sure of it.

And I thank you for reading this, the longest and most indulgent issue to date of what is ever a highly indulgent newsletter. Tchuß, ciao!