Find the Best Restaurants in Berlin

This evening, the upper echelon of German gastronomy will squeeze into the Gesellschaftshaus Palmengarten in Frankfurt, order a drink they're too nervous to finish, and wait for an envelope to decide their year. It's June 23rd and it's the day that the Michelin Guide Germany 2026 will be released. And as we do every single year, we've spent the run-up arguing about Berlin: who climbs, who falls, who finally gets the star they've been quietly bleeding for.

This year the arguing produced fewer answers than usual. More on that in a moment. First, a confession that I need you to actually hear, because everything below depends on it.

Whatever you read in this piece, is based my core belief: the Guide Michelin is a tremendous resource, and more necessary now than it has ever been. In an age where every second social media account with a ring light is a food critique, it’s important to keep in mind how no other outlet sends trained, full-time, anonymous inspectors across the planet who pay for every meal. Most "Best Of" lists are PR contests - Michelin is the exception to the rule, the one institution still treating a restaurant review as a discipline instead of a content format.

That it can afford this monastic rigour because the world's largest tyre company is bankrolling it from the back is in my opinion a good thing to keep in mind, but not a disqualification. The luxury of independence has to be financed by somebody.

So when I criticise the Guide, and I'm about to, understand that I'm doing it the way you argue with family. From the inside, and because I care.

The 2025 edition of the German Guide Michelin was, frankly, one of the best in years. Berlin landed three new one-stars, and all three felt like the right kind of bet: young, hungry restaurants rather than safe bets. Matthias in Prenzlauer Berg, Pars in Charlottenburg, and Loumi in Kreuzberg. Up-and-comers were rewarded for their boldness, which is exactly what this city's energy deserves.

It wasn't all upward. Ernst closed its doors and we lost some others, so the net count held at 22 starred restaurants, roughly twice what Hamburg or Munich can muster. Down at the casual end, Remi and Mastan picked up Bib Gourmands, something nobody sane would argue with.

A good year. Which is part of why this one feels so foggy.

Here's the honest headline: this year there is no glaring lighthouse, no restaurant where you slam the table and shout that it's criminal they don't have a star yet (we've done this precious years for Hallmann & Klee and Loumi). Instead there is a long bench of plausible contenders and almost no way to call them.

A sharp piece by esteemed food writer Felix Denk in last week’s Tagesspiegel put it well: There a lot of theoretical candidates for stars in Berlin, but it's literally impossible to predict the outcome. Lovis? Macionga? Dae Mon? Sure, but then also why? No reinvention, no gear-shift that would force an upgrade. So maybe. Or maybe not.

It will, however, be highly interesting to watch whether more contemporary projects get rewarded. Both Merold and Aerde would be fun upgrades and echo the sentiment put forth last year.

Three restaurants I'd genuinely love to see jump from one star to two: Loumi Dining, which keeps quietly leveling up, Hallmann & Klee, where the cooking already eats like a two-star meal and Tulus Lotrek, where the owners Max Strohe and Ilona Scholl keel popping their heads into every conceivable German media outlet.

And then there's CODA. If anyone in Berlin has earned a conversation about a third star, it's René Frank and Julia Leitner, who have pushed this restaurant from a dessert-only curiosity into what they call a "non-conformist kitchen", a restaurant now spoken about far beyond the borders of Berlin and Germany. At a recent collaboration dinner alongside Tohru from Munich, which collected its third star last year, I sat there thinking Coda's plates were every bit Tohru's equal, and on a couple of courses, quietly better. Make of that what you will.

The two Berlin restaurants whose food in my opinion most clearly merits an upgrade are, almost by definition, the two least likely to receive one. Both because of what they cook.

Shiori, the Japanese kaiseki-and-omakase counter we just crowned the most profound Japanese restaurant in the city, where chef Shiori Arai runs the seasons like a metronome. And UUU in Wedding, a tiny Chinese fine-dining room turning out the most sophisticated Chinese cooking in Berlin, full stop.

Here's the uncomfortable pattern: handing stars to non-European restaurants, and to migrant chefs cooking their own traditions at the very top level, has historically been a struggle for the German Michelin Guide. Michelin managed it once in Berlin with the Thai restaurant Kin Dee, which held its star from 2019 to 2023 before the inspectors quietly took it back. I'd love nothing more than for the inspectors to leap over their own shadow this year and give Shiori and UUU what their kitchens have already proven. It would be a wonderful story, but I'm not holding my breath.

Set all that against Golvet, where we recently went back under new head chef Nicholas Hahn. I'm predicting Golvet holds will hold its star, and I'll tell you exactly why: this crew plays it safe. Go here for a polished, classical fine-dining meal, the kind an inspector can sink into like a warm bath. Box ticked, comfort zone intact, star renewed. No risk for anybody.

It's far tougher for the restaurants that don't fit the template. The further you establish your concept away from the inherited idea of European fine dining, the more the whole exercise starts to feel like a raffle.

If you speak to chefs and hospitality professionals in Berlin, they'll tell you the same thing: the Guide remains a lighthouse, but its logic in Germany can be very hard to understand.

Take last week's Bib Gourmands, dropped ahead of the gala. Two went to Berlin: Byblos, a Lebanese spot out west, and Salhino, a Georgian one. We had a long argument about it in the Berlin Food Club Discord when the news were released, and knowledgeable Lebanese voices couldn’t reconstruct the reasoning. I haven't eaten at Byblos and I'm not calling it a bad restaurant. But for anyone who has experience with Berlin's Levantine and Arabic scene, it's hard to argue this is the address that earns an accolade setting it apart from the pack.

Or look one city over. In Hamburg, a noodle shop called Cyn Cyn just took a Bib for its Biang Biang noodles. Cyn Cyn is, more or less, a tribute act to Wen Cheng, the hand-pulled phenomenon that has spawned something like fifty imitators across Berlin alone. One of the Hamburg copies gets a Bib. None of the Berlin originals do.

But here, finally, is my real point, the one sitting underneath all the others: I am not bashing Michelin for any of this - I'm just diagnosing the challenges the Michelin Guide is facing.

The Guide's resources, even Michelin's, are finite. There is no battalion of inspectors living in Neukölln, eating their way across Berlin week after week. The inspectors travel the whole country, the whole continent, and Berlin is one pit stop on an enormous map. To properly cover the most diverse, most multifaceted restaurant city in Germany, by some distance, you wouldn't need a handful of extra visits. You'd need ten times the inspectors and ten times the meals. That gap, not malice and not snobbery, I like to call the "Pit-Stop Problem". It's why the Berlin verdict so often reads like it was assembled in a hurry by someone with a train to catch.

The answer isn't to bash the Michelin Guide. It's to resource it.

So I'll say the quiet part out loud, and aim it at the people who can act. Michelin already runs this exact model elsewhere: when a country or region wants fuller coverage than the standing inspector budget allows, there are partnership and funding arrangements that ultimately pay for inspectors to be sent in properly. Tourism boards co-finance the work all over the world. It is neither secret nor scandalous. It is simply how the map gets drawn.

Berlin should do the same. I'm calling on the city, on the Senat, on Visit Berlin, to sit down and fund enough inspector visits for Berlin and, maybe, even a dedicated Berlin guide (there are no Michelin City Guides at the moment). A Michelin Guide, with enough anonymous inspectors eating here often enough to finally capture what Berlin actually offers: the Vietnamese, the Levantine, the Chinese, the Georgian, the numerous casual fine dining projects and the natural-wine rooms and, yes, the classical German temples too. Scramble the budget. And cover Berlin in a way this city deserves.

Because the extraordinary food level is already here. It has been for years.

Until then we'll do what we always do tomorrow night: Watch the Michelin live stream, argue in the group chat, and toast whoever ends up crying happy tears in Frankfurt. Drücken wir die Daumen. And then, star or no star, we'll go eat somewhere this city loves, preferably with a little chilli oil or kebap fat still on our lips when we walk home.