Italian Cuisine | Just Around the Corner

A friend asked me the other day if there were good Italian restaurants in Berlin besides the well known Bocca di Bacco on Friedrichstraße, the Trattoria Paparazzi run by Doris Burneleit, a GDR cuisine pioneer in Prenzlauer Berg, or the usual suspects around Mitte. He was just looking for a good and no-fuss Italian place around the corner that would work for dinner with friends from work, family or loved ones. Oh. A good Italian restaurant that's not fancy shmancy over the top? Not so easy in Berlin. When everyone got wind of the fact that it's pretty easy to make money with pizza and pasta, fake Italians started mushrooming up everywhere. Taken to an extreme, this resulted in cheap franchise offshoots that all looked the same from inside and all served the same mediocre grub.

But incidentally, another friend of mine mentioned a couple of days later that she had discovered a great Italian restaurant directly around the corner. Osteria Centrale lies somewhat hidden at a very remote edge of Bleibtreustraße, where “Jesus once lost himself” as the modest restaurant owner Roberto de Santis puts it. He and his wife have been playing host here for a bulk of regulars that has been returning ever since the opening roughly ten years ago. “Some of our regulars have become dear friends after all of these years. Those that believed in us from the beginning are very close to our hearts”. Mila Gomez points to a table across from the bar, where regulars sit twice to three times a week, always at this very table of course. 

The woman of the house waits on guests on every day of the week except Sundays to bring food from the kitchen and wine from the well-sorted wine cellar that houses over 180 Italian wines. Roberto de Santis was a wine dealer once, but the disappointing payment morales in the business took all the fun out of it for him, as did the rapid progression of globalization that led to corporate mergers even in the wine business, big names that de Santis simply could not take on. He's a perfectionist, says his wife, and guests can only profit from the resulting steady quality and freshness. The little slates brought to the tables have new menus chalked on them every day. “We started out with the slates because we didn't have a steady menu yet.” While de Santis started out with a team of chefs, he took over as head of the kitchen in 2009. Meals are prepared “à la minute” so groups of eight persons or more will usually have to settle for a fixed meal. De Santis is puzzled as to why pizza and pasta remain the first things most people associate with Italian cuisine. “That type of cooking is conceived for tourists. A real Berlin gourmet will expect something very different.”

(emh)