More and more gourmet restaurants are opening in Berlin-Kreuzberg, and their chefs are among the most innovative in the country. A culinary foray through a neighborhood in which there is a restaurant in almost every house.
It wasn’t love at first sight between the Orania and Kreuzberg. The window panes of the corner building with the magnificent sandstone facade on Oranienplatz still bear witness to the paving stones that were initially thrown. Cracks and cracks stretch across the glass like cobwebs. “At some point we decided not to fix it anymore,” says Philipp Vogel. “Somehow that belongs to Kreuzberg.” The 40-year-old chef at the Orania restaurant, who also runs the boutique hotel of the same name, involuntarily ended up at the center of the Berlin gentrification debate when it opened four years ago. And that despite the fact that the former Orange Palace had been empty for years and threatened to deteriorate.