Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel are probably the only German politicians I can name without having to Google them. Well, I mean, there are others, obviously, but let’s not make this a political science essay.
The important thing is that neither of them, particularly, makes me think: lovely, I could murder a schnitzel.
And yet this is precisely what makes Ständige Vertretung work.
Because this is a restaurant where the politics isn’t some tasteful little nod in the corner. It is absolutely everywhere. Photographs, memorabilia, history, politicians looking stern, politicians looking slightly less stern. It is basically what would happen if a German parliament got drunk and decided to open a pub.
And in Berlin, somehow, it makes perfect sense.
I cannot imagine anything worse than walking into a restaurant in London and finding the walls covered in photographs of Liz Truss, John Major and Boris Johnson. You’d be halfway through the door and already asking whether they did takeaway. It would be enough to put me off my soup.
Here, however, it adds to the atmosphere. You’re not just having dinner; you’re having dinner surrounded by German political history, while someone brings you a beer and a frankly alarming quantity of pork.
And the food is exactly what you want it to be: classic, traditional German cooking. All the greatest hits are here. Pork knuckle. Currywurst. Schnitzel. Things that have clearly never been introduced to the concept of portion control.
I had a beer in a Kölsch glass and a lump of pork so substantial that, had I been buried underneath it, archaeologists in 2,000 years would have assumed it was some kind of ceremonial German monument.
And it was good. Really good.
There is nothing clever going on here, and thank God for that. This is food that knows exactly what it is supposed to do. It is comforting, hearty, salty, enormous and designed to make you immediately consider whether you actually need to eat again this week.
The service is great, the décor is historic, and the whole place has that wonderful sense that you are experiencing something properly rooted in the city rather than eating in a restaurant that could just as easily be in an airport in Singapore.
Ständige Vertretung is not trying to reinvent German food. It is doing something much more useful: giving you the German food you came to Berlin hoping to eat, in a room that feels like Berlin, surrounded by the ghosts of the people who spent decades arguing about how Berlin should be run.
I’d go out of my way to come here again.
It’s basically the German equivalent of having afternoon tea at the Ritz with Maggie Thatcher.
And frankly, I’d rather have the pork.
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