Cafe Jacques will always hold a warm place in my heart.
We arrived to a cool and dark Berlin – totally unfamiliar with our surroundings, overwhelmed by the train system, tired and hungry. Arriving in Berlin and making it to our hotel was smooth, the room was lovely and we had a 20 minute walk to a restaurant I’d been ogling for months on instagram.
We started the walk and found ourselves in a not-so nice area – large groups of men who leered and offered us drugs, cat called us and generally the walk was very uncomfortable. We arrived to the restaurant to see IT WAS BLOODY CLOSED.
Close to tears of anger. I did a quick search for restaurants nearby and Cafe Jacques looked nice. And it was.
We arrived to a quieter neighbourhood where Jacques is located – I borrowed this picture as my iPhone didn’t pick up the outside properly in the dark!
Inside, there is only one word: COSY!
Photo credit: @marypilix
The menu was not tourist friendly, but thankfully the staff were. We served by a couple of girls who couldn’t have been nicer and really helped us order properly! For that we were SO grateful!
We ordered the fish platter to share for a starter. It contained sea bass, salmon and cod and an assortment of salad pieces. The salad pieces included: stripped cucumber in a dressing, couscous with spinach (this is a guess!), beetroot salad, dressed olives, paprika topped houmous and chunky Timor’s. The houmous was really tasty with their home baked bread.
Naming and describing these dishes is slightly different. This was lamb and vegetables. I can’t properly tell you much about what the chef wrote on the board and I can’t really go into detail on much, but what I CAN tell you is that this chef cooks meat impeccably! The photo just isn’t great at all, and the place looks a bit bare with the presentation but it made up for it all in flavour! It was so tender and moist that I felt emotional eating it. Absolutely gorgeous.
I had a trio of the beef. If you can read German and fancy translating the menu board at the top of the post, you may want to let me know what my trio was! Same as before though, the meat was soft as butter and so juicy and glorious! The square of dauphinoise potatoes looks dire in this picture but I can assure you that the garlicky flavour and the cream:potato ratio was absolutely spot on – the best dauphinoise I’ve ever tasted!
The waitress – in addition to translating, refilling our glasses and generally being a gem – also called us a taxi to take us safely back to our hotel, where I gladly slipped into a beautiful meat coma, ready to explore the city of Berlin in the morning!
*
Cafe Jacques, Maybachufer 14, 12047 Berlin
030 6941048
*
The Plate Escapes 