Where I Actually Eat in Berlin: An Irish Person’s Guide to Not Getting It Wrong
I moved to Berlin from Dublin in 2021 with confident, strongly-held opinions about food. Within six months every single one of them had been revised. Berlin does not have one food culture. It has approximately forty, layered on top of each other, some of which have been here for decades and some of which arrived last Tuesday.
The döner situation
Yes, I’m starting here. The döner kebab in Berlin is not the same thing as the döner kebab in Dublin, London, or anywhere else you have eaten one. It is cheaper, larger, better, and more seriously considered. The bread is different. The sauce is different. The meat is different. There are whole debates about which part of the city does it best — Neukölln versus Kreuzberg is a conversation that can last two hours in the right company.
What I will say: the best döner I have eaten in Berlin was at a place near the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn that had no name on the outside and cost €4.50. This is how it works. The more prominently a döner place is listed on tourist sites, the worse it is. Go to the one that has a queue of working people at lunchtime.
Vietnamese food
Berlin has a substantial Vietnamese community, a legacy of the GDR-era labour agreements between East Germany and Vietnam. The Vietnamese restaurants and grocery stores concentrated around Dong Xuân Center in Lichtenberg are the real thing — a wholesale market and food court that operates almost entirely within the Vietnamese community. It takes about 40 minutes from central Berlin but it is unlike anything else in the city.
Closer to where most people stay: the Vietnamese places around Neukölln and Friedrichshain are consistently good and consistently cheap. Pho for €7–10. Bun bo hue when it’s on the menu. The noodle soups here are worth every minute of the trip.
Turkish food beyond the döner
The Türkischer Markt on the Maybachufer in Neukölln runs on Tuesday and Friday afternoons along the canal. This is not a tourist market. It is an actual functioning market for the Turkish community and everyone else in the neighbourhood. Olives, cheeses, fresh herbs, flatbreads, vegetables at prices that make the supermarket look embarrassing. Go on a Friday when it’s at its fullest.
Berlin breakfast culture
Berlin takes breakfast seriously in a way that still surprises me. Not hotel breakfast — café breakfast. The long, leisurely mid-morning weekend breakfast that can last until 2pm. Almost every neighbourhood café does a version of it. The standard is bread, cold cuts, cheeses, eggs, coffee, juice. The price is usually €8–12 for a full spread. This is not a tourist thing — it is a genuinely embedded social ritual, and if you are in Berlin for a weekend, you should do it at least once.
