I will warn you: I will not be able to write as glowing a review of this restaurant as it deserves. My words will fail me.

A quick background…a friend who works at the Deutsche Oper asked a Korean colleague one day where she could eat good Korean food here in Berlin. “The absolute best is a place where you would never imagine it to be. On Winterfeldplatz, a quick walk from Nollendorfplatz, is a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant with benches inside, no real waitress, an atmosphere like a storeroom rather than a dining room, and Bible verses covering every inch of the walls. They have a very small menu. But, the food that comes out of that kitchen is better than my own grandmother could make.” The man was, of course, referring to Ixthys. He was also dead on in regards to every aspect of the place.

The food, oh, God, the food! I have never in my life eaten such a Be Bim Bop. It comes out in a stone bowl, sizzling hot. The Kim Chi, too is phenomenal. I feel that I now know what Kim Chi should taste like, and that all these years I have gotten some store-bought, generic imitation that should have made me outraged.

If you read my reviews, you know what I place high priority on: the food. And, once you taste it there, you will look around at the verses on the walls and the simplicity of the place and see it all not as a hole-in-the-wall, but as your own little portal to the other side of the world. I always imagine that I have been there before, invited by a Korean friend to his home, where his mom can be trusted to always make me a fine meal, eager to fill my belly when she sees me. Did you ever see “Like Water for Chocolate”? The food of this place gets enchanted, embedded with the good intentions of those who cook it, I think. I can almost taste it. Something about this place just puts a smile on my face—it must be the love in the food.

One of the strangest restaurants I’ve ever been in, pretty much a one woman operation, but its the religious quotations and wittings that make it unusual. Whether is the wittings on the wall or in the menus its everywhere. In the case of the menu there actually more religious instruction than items to eat.

The dish I had was tasty but not so much so that I’d rush back again and at 8 euros it wasn’t particularly cheep despite the café feel to the place.