The rarest trick in hospitality isn't becoming iconic. It's staying iconic while continuing to evolve. Let me tell you about a Berlin restaurant that pulled off exactly that and, in the process, became one of the most underrated places to eat in the city

When restaurants have been performing at a very high level for two decades, change is usually the last thing you expect. They calcify. They coast. They become predictable. They tend to become the restaurant you stop thinking about. Enoteca Il Calice was exactly that for me.

Don't me wrong, Il Calice is by all means one of Berlin's most iconic Italian restaurants. Founded by the Veneto-born Antonio Bragato, who opened the first version with this wife in the 1990s, before moving it to its current home on Walter-Benjamin-Platz in 2001, Il Calice is nothing but a proper institution. Equipped with a lofty dining room with an upstairs gallery that opens onto a square with proper Italian piazza vibes and, in summer, hosts the infamous Il Calice Aperitivo Kiosk. Antonio's younger son Louis Bragato joined Il Calice in 2016 with the outspoken goal of making it the best Italian restaurant in the city. They had the location and the cellar for it: Antonio is one of Berlin's most respected wine authorities, with his own winery, his own bottles on the list, and one of the few cellars in town where wine is actually aged, not sold the week it lands.

This family business ambition succeeded. Il Calice has cemented its status as one of Berlin's great Italian restaurants. Classic, expensive, but always worth it. Yet it has traditionally catered to an affluent West Berlin crowd, and its reach among the city's expat and East Berlin diners has remained comparatively limited.

Fast forward to August 2025. After a few unsuccessful attempts to modernize the menu with different chefs, the Bragatos didn't reach for another safe pair of classical hands. They hired Danny Benedettini, whom I'd first clocked in the mid-2010s at Wagner on Paul-Lincke-Ufer, where I tremendously enjoyed his progressive casual fine dining cuisine. One thing was clear to me, though: he was never a classical Italian chef. Which made handing him a temple to classical Italian cooking either a category error or a stroke of genius.

But the hire most definitely caught my attention, and over the last six months I've dined at Il Calice more often than I'd admit to my accountant. During that time, I've watched Il Calice grow into its new identity.

Early on, the combination felt slightly unfinished. But with each visit, Benedettini got bolder, the two worlds knitting together more tightly until a dinner last month with the Berlin Food Club, when I felt it had fully come together.

A dinner at Il Calice is first and foremost about the basics. Like the quality of the olive oil for your bread: aggressively peppery in a way that announces itself at the back of your throat like a small, polite argument. It's the kind of oil that ruins every supermarket bottle in your kitchen the second you're home. The charcuterie is the next flex: not just any ham but Prosciutto D'Osvaldo, sliced so thin it does that thing where you stop talking mid-sentence. Essentials such as the vitello tonnato and guinea fowl terrine are immaculate; the pansotti ravioli stuffed with spinach and the linguine with Alba truffles in season are exactly as good as that sentence sounds. The Milanese, the steak, the grilled fish, the pan-fried sole: all of it lands.

But the classics are the warm-up act. The specials are the show.

A rectangular cube of beef tongue, slow-cooked then finished over charcoal with an umami-packed glaze and served with salsa verde and a perfect anchovy, where the fish's umami crashed into my tongue so completely that it briefly, and against all geographic logic, transported me to a night market in Taipei eating pork blood cake off a stick. A saffron risotto, textbook in texture, carrying generous shell-free chunks of steamed brown crab. A saltimbocca where the veal scallopini has been swapped for sweetbread. Then the chicken alla diavola: a whole spatchcocked bird, the crispiest skin in Berlin over the juiciest meat, on a bed of mascarpone-'nduja sauce, so good it worked the room on its way to your table. Heads turned. Noses lifted. Strangers quietly started resenting you.

"Why am I not eating that?!"

Here's my point, beyond the food. Enoteca Il Calice in 2026 is an extraordinarily complete restaurant: impeccable cooking, a cellar with real depth, a room that oozes fancy without sneering, plus some of the best-trained front-of-house staff around. A romantic date, your parents' birthday, a business dinner you absolutely need to win: Il Calice handles all of these with ease, without blinking. And while the in-the-know crowd is starting to whisper about it, this restaurant is by all means one of the most underrated meals in Berlin right now.

So go. Out to Charlottenburg, where everyone swears the exciting food isn't, and order the classics and all the specials. Leave with a little chili on your lips and the smug certainty that you're in on something the rest of the city hasn't caught up to yet.

Buon appetito.