The Germans really seem to get the hospitality side of restaurant management. During each of my four meals, the service, in its own peculiar way, reflected the restaurant’s aspirations and felt not only appropriate but completely in synch with the quality and style of the cuisine.
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Amador was absolutely transparent, with a hint of familiarity. Plates appear out of thin air and just as suddenly vanish into the ether. But all questions are immediately anticipated and any time you look up, you find someone kind, warm, and knowledgeable to tell you about the most minute details of a dish or offer up a spot-on wine pairing.
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Bau (more on this soon, I promise) was opulent, deliberate, but still accessible. There was an unmistakable gravitas to each delivery but the formality was not stifling, and thankfully, not kitschy. Your table was the epicenter of the culinary universe – it felt regal in the best possible way. In Terrine, I was a friend. Anecdotes, smiles, and glasses of wine were freely exchanged. I departed with a warm handshake.
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Reinstoff celebrates excess. But you have to find it before you can join the celebration. Turn onto tiny Schlegelstraße in Berlin Mitte and duck down an alley next to a jazz club in the middle of the block, to reach an unassuming courtyard. Look left, and find a metal and glass cube, near pitch-black, with hefty curtains obscuring the view inside. Pass go, collect $200.
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I was greeted and whisked to a table along the back wall, from where I could observe the other patrons and admire the ultramodern room, awash in black and exposed metal. The lighting was sparse and dim, and only the stark white tablecloths broke through the monotony.
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Chef Daniel Achilles offers two tasting menus, titled ‘quite near’ and ‘far away.’ The former presents modern riffs on traditional German cuisine, while the latter seems to have no reference, other than the modern cookery of Germany’s new wave of chefs. I chose the lengthier ‘far away’ tasting and, as I was dining alone, I accompanied it with the optional wine pairing. I now question the first choice, but not the second.
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The wine pairing at Reinstoff worked as follows: a generously poured glass arrives a good ten minutes before the course it is meant to accompany. Finish that glass, and another is poured gratis. Finish the second pour, while enjoying your course, let’s say, and you get a third top-up. Considering that there are eight courses, plus copious bites at the beginning and at the end, depending on one’s constitution and self-restraint, it’s possible to not survive the meal, or at least not remember it.[1]
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The amuses arrived en masse. The spoons on the left tile were beetroot, eel from the Müritz and garden cress at the top and egg, mustard and mache on the bottom. The beetroot cookie, a tad sweet, was layered with eel forcemeat and beet strips, with a few leaves of cress topping the stack. This was a tasty if overly familiar combination. The quail egg, coated in mustard, straddling a mache puree was a far better bite, with the sweet-hot mustard tamed by the egg yolk.
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The tile on the right held a foie gras and chocolate bonbon titled duck liver, cacao and mango. It was superb and perfectly proportioned. The foie had a pronounced and refined flavor.
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Last, a lollipop of vegetable muesli was paired with a piquant and salty yogurt. This, too, was very tasty and collectively the amuses left me excited for the meal to come.
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The first proper course, brined tuna, peas and pomelo, proved yet again that technique cannot mask sub-par ingredients. The tuna, cured for too long in soy and draped with a sheet of gelatinized soy sauce, was overly ferric and seemed to have as much connective tissue as meat. The pea puree and fresh peas, while perfectly harmless by themselves, intensified the metallic flavor of the fish.
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Langoustine poached in vanilla milk, cauliflower, almond cream and tonic fared better, but not by much. The langoustine tail was mushy, but at least the flavor of shellfish and vanilla was not jarring, and the creamy/crunchy contrast of cauliflower, almond cream, and marcona almonds was pleasant. I became more and more happy that I had a bottomless wine pairing.
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The wine-fueled rollercoaster of a meal hit a peak with goose liver, spruce scions and goat quark cheese. The quark, rolled into balls and coated in spruce ash, melded well with cubes of an excellent foie torchon and the vegetal respite of some bitter greens. This was a truly great course, well dimensioned and thought out.
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A fairly tasty tranche of plaice was lost amid the rampant acid of the pickled mushrooms and the saline fishiness of the bacalao puree (which was quite tasty by itself). The sweet/sour cherries provided a brief respite but were too few to contend with the overpowering flavors that dominated place from Brittany, cherries, cod fish paste and pickled mushrooms.
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Another oddity, saddle of suckling pig, summer onion, seaweed and saffron stock, was dominated by a heavy-handed seaweed stock and too-raw summer onions. The saddle was wonderfully cooked and exceedingly tender but it didn’t stand a chance against the oceanic broth.
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Basil sorbet, cucumber, elderflower and Gin proved an effective palate cleanser and a delicious, light, and fresh course in its own right. Hendrick’s Gin, floral and summery, was poured tableside over a cucumber sorbet and a perfect cucumber brunoise, making an edible cucumber gimlet. When I mentioned how much I enjoy Hendrick’s, the sommelier brought out a bottle of Monkey 47, a local Gin from the Black Forest. If you like Gin, and especially if you like your Gin on the floral side, seek out this excellent bottle. In keeping with the restaurant’s alcohol policy, the bottle was left on my table to drink at my leisure.
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Venison from Fürstenberg, corn, avocado and BBQ was yet another disaster. The venison itself was lovely, well-cooked, and flavorful, but the tasteless, plasticky corn kernels and under-ripe to the point of being crunchy avocado, along with a cloying BBQ sauce, did the dish no favors. Another refill, please. Or perhaps some more Gin.
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Having had my fill of chef Achilles’ modernity, I had requested to try the dessert from the ‘quite near’ menu and was rewarded with local wild berries, herb floss and raisin pancake ice cream. The mélange of berries, tart and sweet, was sauced with a berry puree and sweetened with cotton candy that was partially melted into the dish when the sauce was applied. The raisin-flecked ice cream tamed the berries’ tartness. Everything married wonderfully and each bite seemed in harmony.
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Mignardises: Orange carrot Solero, Piña especial, Summer truffles and cereals, Mint chocolate
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Mignardises also merited high marks, especially the orange and carrot Solero, an orange and carrot Popsicle effortlessly combined the bright acidity of the former with the vaguely grassy sweetness of the latter.
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Perhaps I erred by choosing the more avant garde menu, but I thought a chef of Achilles’ stature could execute such modernity well. Maybe the menu suffered because it lacked a point of origin and instead seemed a progression of out-of-focus dishes. It seemed to offer a clean break from the cooking of the past but did not have a unifying style or theme; it was a progression of singles. Nothing grounded this cooking or gave it direction, and the cuisine was just grasping at modernist straws.
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Whatever the reason for the flavor disconnect, I was taken aback by the proliferation of middling ingredients. Other than the foie and the venison, nothing stood out. Well, except of course for that wine pairing.
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Restaurant Reinstoff
Edison Höfe Berlin Mitte
Schlegelstraße 26c
Berlin
[1] Or, as was the case for the couple seated to my left, it may turn a dinner out into a display of affection that borders on the pornographic.
