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Café Im Literaturhaus

CHARLOTTENBURG

Located just off the swarming Ku’damm, Fasanenstrasse is a street purpose-built for strolling. Galleries are hosted inside statuary-laden houses, pristine Altbauten repose behind skeins of ivy, and charming little boutiques draw the eye. Along the way you’ll happen across the Café im Literaturhaus. With its yellow-painted walls, ornate ceiling mouldings and froufrou chandeliers, the café occupies a demure little villa and makes up part of the more extensive Literaturhaus, which also includes a small, subterranean bookshop and hosts a comprehensive calendar of literary events.

Tucked behind a strip of garden, a tiny fountain garnishing the entrance, the café is a place of endearing contrasts (it even has an alternate name, the Café Wintergarten), managing to be both unpretentious and elegant. Atop the steps, you’ll find yourself in a brick-walled winter garden filled with lunching guests being treated to a cinemascope view of the garden’s vegetation – coppery, down-spiralling leaves in the autumn or luscious, blossoming life in the spring.

The winter garden is strangely hushed, no matter how busy it gets. Pass through the next doorway and it’s an entirely different situation: to the left, a wall of black-and-white photographs provides an artistic backdrop for the bustling baristas pulling cafés-au-lait and emitting all the flair of a Viennese street café. To the right, two adjoining rooms feature Art Deco embellishments, mixed with a series of broody portraits lining the walls.

It’s a perfect place for many occasions, as you’ll witness: entire families enjoying cosy, extended brunches, couples indulging in classic Kaffee und Kuchen meet-ups, writers discussing their manuscripts over alcohol-filled tumblers. Somehow the highs and lows of it all chime perfectly with the café’s mash-up of bookish types who are about to head next door for a reading and the well-off West Berlin retirees resting their legs between a shop and a stroll. If anywhere does intellectual meets Oma, it’s this place. GG

Fasanenstr. 23, 10719; U Uhlandstr.; www.literaturhaus-berlin.de

Map: West D3