When I describe Berlin to people who don't live here, I usually explain it as a “limitless” place. You can raise a family in a quiet, tree-lined corner of Wilmersdorf and structure your weeks around concerts and exhibitions, or you can walk into a fetish club on a Monday afternoon and live out whatever it is you need to live out. Both lives are available, and we judge neither. However, there is one lifestyle Berlin refuses to accommodate properly, and that’s the long, extensive, fine (and possibly boozy) weekday lunch. Berlin has never built a culture around it and there are no corporate expense accounts that include this kind of luxury. Berliners eat lunch the way they answer emails, quickly and without ceremony, and the restaurant landscape has arranged itself accordingly. Of the 19 Michelin-starred restaurants in the city, exactly one opens its doors for lunch during the week.

That restaurant is Facil, and lunch is not an afterthought at this restaurant. It is a specialty and a Berlin food tradition that needs to be experienced.

The obvious question, when you have sent as many people to a place as I have sent to Facil, is whether you are recommending it because it is genuinely excellent or because there is simply no other option Twenty-five years of evidence, and one extraordinary lunch this summer (to celebrate that 25 year anniversary), point firmly to the first answer.

Facil opened on 2 July 2001, on the fifth floor of The Mandala Hotel on Potsdamer Straße, set in a glass pavilion inside a bamboo courtyard above Potsdamer Platz. The location and the interior style, complete with indoor fountain and glas walls, breathe 1990-luxury and evoke deep feelings of nostalgia. This is classic German fine dining across the board: the polished glass, the white tablecloths, the choreography of service that some people might find suffocating and others find profoundly reassuring.

What almost nobody knows, including people who have eaten here several often, is how little the cast has changed. Michael Kempf arrived in 2003, aged 26, and has been steering this ship as culinary director for an astonishing 23 years now. That’s not all though, Chef Pâtissier Thomas Yoshida has been there since the very first service, all crazy 25 years of it. The young gun Joachim Gerner came in 2006 as sous-chef and has been chef de cuisine since 2015. Felix Voges has curated the wine list since opening. That kind of continuity is almost unheard of in this industry, and especially in Berlin, and it explains a great deal about how the food tastes.

It also explains something Facil never gets enough credit for: One of my longest-running gripes about the Berlin food scene is how little talent the big fine dining houses actually train and send into the world to open their own restaurants. Facil is the loud exception. Sarah Hallmann did her apprenticeship here under Kempf and Gerner before opening Hallmann & Klee. Jonas Zörner, now chef de cuisine at Lorenz Adlon Esszimmer, came through this kitchen. So did Maximilian Kindel of Birds in the Kitchen, Ivano Pirolo of Cielo and Wenzel Pankratz, now running Forsthaus Strelitz, our favourite, countryside destination restaurant. The list keeps going, and it just shows how Facil is an environment where cooks not only learn the fundamentals properly, but also are encouraged to showcase their skills beyond the restaurant.

I have always compared German fine dining to German carmakers. Creativity is occasionally in short supply, but the execution is ruthlessly precise, and the equivalent of building a good car here is making sublime sauces and cooking proteins perfectly. The technique is always on the money.

Our anniversary lunch made clear that the restaurant has quietly gotten better. The signature Brittany sole came as a roulade with oyster and scallop rolled inside it, everything cooked to the exact right second, sitting in a velouté of almost indecent richness with sensationally perfect spinach on the side. There is nowhere else in this city where you can eat a dish like that. The Austrian chicken dish does something similar with an arancini, artichoke, and an Albufera Madeira & Foie Gras sauce that reads on paper like a dare. You brace for the intensity to flatten you, but end up being stunned by how the elegance of the seasoning runs through the whole meal.

At lunch you can take the set menu for 88EUR, which is genuinely fantastic value for money, or dip into the more elaborate à la carte “Gourmet Menu”. The wine list is exactly what you want from a restaurant at this level: deep, full of aged rarities, and unbeatable if you want to drink classic German or French. The secret tip are their small-format bottles from prominent Burgundy producers. We drank a banger 2015 Vosne-Romanée from Domaine Confuron Cotétidot, the affordable neighbour of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for 100 euros, which is close to theft.

The desserts will transport you to German fine dining in the 90s, and I mean that with a mix of affection and critique. Yoshida's “Zen Garden” plate showcases incredible technique, but does in the end look a lot like a Playmobil toy set. My favorite is his signature cloud dessert, containing multiple “pockets” of flavored “clouds” that arrive as a small symphony of exotic fruit.

So has Facil lost its glamour at 25? I would argue the exact opposite. The place is cooking as well as it ever has (arguably better than ever), and if you are tired of small shared plates and neo-bistros copying each other's menus down to the the smallest detail, skip a few of those meals, book a table at Facil, and go eat serious craftsmanship. You will not regret it. We are lucky to have this restaurant, and I am looking forward to the next 25 years of it.