Everyone Needs a Good Schnitzel

Anna Winger's Favorite Places

My friend Anna Winger is an accomplished screenwriter, novelist and producer who has lived in Berlin for almost 22 years. She also has impeccable taste in food and is an incredible entertainer. We met when I first moved back to Berlin in 2010 and since then she’s gone from novel-writing to big-time television. I visited her at her Studio Airlift office a few weeks ago to ask her about her favorite places in Berlin. Here’s what she told me.

Anna:
When people come to town, like writers’ rooms or tourists, everybody needs to have a good schnitzel. We take them to Wirtshaus zum Mitterhofer. There are other places to have fancier schnitzel, like Engelbecken, obviously, or that place next to Paris Bar, Ottenthal. But there's something about Mittelhofer that people really like.

My favorite place to shop is the green market at Südstern. It’s my Saturday market.

Then I have a number of my favorite restaurants which are not owned by Germans at all. One is Two Trick Pony, which is owned by a South African-Irish couple and makes like amazing salads and stuff and breakfast and brunch. Hallesches Haus, which is also a general store owned by American and British owners. I love Teller, which is owned by an Israeli chef. And I love the Marheineke Markthalle at Marheinecke Platz. There are these French guys who sell oysters and cheese and wine. They have expanded over the years and we always get all the food for special events there.

The best bakery in the world is Johann. It is like a dream scenario. Jason Danziger calls it the Church of Johann. If I go there on a Sunday morning, I'll run into all these friends and everybody's made this pilgrimage to the Church of Johann. It's so cool that this baker, in his thirties, just decided to open the greatest bakery in the world on a tiny side street that no one would even walk down, you know?

For Jewish holidays, I always go to Fine Bagels to get bagels and challah. For Rosh Hashanah, Laurel [Kratochvila, the owner—and author of New European Baking] makes these round challah that are amazing. I always order mine in advance. And I actually think her bagels are better than bagels in New York. I literally think she has surpassed my memory of a New York bagel.

It's kind of incredible to have these other foreigners here who make the things that I miss from home, because when I first came here, you couldn't get anything. I once wrote an article for the Times Magazine about celebrating Passover. And it was all about how you had to sort of cobble together some version of Jewish food. Even though so many German foods are kind of Jewish foods, you couldn't get the right ingredients to make the Jewish version. And now you can just get everything here from all over the world.

If we go out as a family, we usually go to places where people are making their own food, whether it's Israeli or Syrian or, you know, American. For example, just off Sonnenallee, on a side street, there's an amazing Syrian place, Aldimashqi. The quality of food in Berlin has finally gotten to a point where you can go to a Syrian restaurant or a Thai restaurant and they're no longer cooking for German taste buds. They're cooking for their own and it's incredible.

Our big entertaining thing that's German is our local butcher Genz who makes his own sausage with free-range meat. He wins prizes for them all the time. He has all these crazy flavors, like wild boar with porcini mushrooms, or chimichurri flavored sausages, and merguez made with beef. So we grill those and we serve them with salad. We've done that for years. That's probably as German as we get in terms of cooking.

And sometimes, if we're having a dinner party, we'll get baklava from this Turkish bakery on Goebenstraße, Pasam Baklava. It is like going to a jewelry shop. And it feels like the Ur West Berlin.

Thank you so much, Anna!

Click the image to see more info and purchase tickets

Click the image to preorder!