There’s something to be said for small restaurants. The service tends to be better, as one might expect, your waiter often also serving as cook, host, and owner. This kind of situation can either be a recipe for great success or one for ultimate disaster. With “Essen Fassen”, the concept works beautifully as the chef is personable, and has created a restaurant that is welcoming in its ambience and feel.

His real talent, though, takes place in the back of the restaurant, where the food is prepared. I would call Essen Fassen’s cuisine a wonderful German version of home-cooking meats haute cuisine. I know this sounds cliché, and as catch phrases go, I even have to admit that using this tired way of describing the mélange of styles is suspect, making my job of getting the idea across all the more difficult. But, I do mean the description quite lovingly. I guess you’ll just have to trust me on that.

This restaurant’s cuisine seems the result of someone who grew up in the country, under the same roof as a woman who had natural talent. She passed that talent down to her son, along with a food palette strongly influenced by German standards. The boy leaves home and widens his palette; time, instruction and kitchen experimentation help. This last bit, the experimentation, in most situations explains why this home-cooking/haute cuisine dichotomy so often goes wrong. Here, though, a sense of taste, and, even, style really reap the benefits of the chef’s sense of adventure in the kitchen on the diners themselves.

Basically, the message I want to convey to you is: go eat there, because this man can cook. But, because Essen Fassen is really a one-man-show, it is also good to know that he who cooks also has original ideas for the menu—one that shows a whimsical spirit, well-grounded in tradition, a chiaro/scura for your mouth.

Essen Fassen, touted as Berlin’s smallest restaurant certainly begs the use of the popular German idiom: “klein aber fein.”