Café in Berlin: Hallesches Haus

Describing this one isn’t easy, it’s a café serving delicious coffee drinks made with roasts from Tom’s Kaffeerösterei, a florist selling beautiful succulents and cacti, a general store stocking nifty items like Stanley pocket flasks and soap smelling like the forests in Big Sur, a furniture show room for Berlin based Nuts and Woods, and it will be a lunchroom and event space any time soon. Altogether it’s a gorgeous space managed by dedicated people trying to revive this rather dull area behind Hallesches Tor.

Located in between a brute furniture store and an Asian market, the owners are proud to call a stunning red brick building the home of this café/store. The house is a former post office built in 1902 and was housing music club Horst Krzbrg until recently. After staying vacant for over a year, four people from Europe and the US started to take over the ground floor, put in some (loads of) work and and turned it into a café, lunch space and store.
I first heard about it on Instagram, where I followed the renovation work that slowly turned the former club into a bright and airy space with gorgeous big windows, arches and raw brick walls.

After putting it on my list of places to try in Spring, I couldn’t wait to make my way over and see whether the store was as beautiful as the instagram pics promised. The place is huge and thoroughly designed, without ever being over styled or too much of a cliché. It’s completely different from anything in this part of Kreuzberg, and still has an open and cosy feel, the tables – made by Nuts and Woods – were filled with a variety of people accessorized with laptops or babies.
The main focus for now is the café and the store with its ever expanding selection of products from all over the world. The goal is to create a general store that sells everything from brushes to planting pots, groceries and books. The café is not only the only good coffee option in the area, but also serves simple dishes cauliflower salad with lentils, spinach and dates, carrot ginger soup or bacon, cheddar and jalapeno biscuits.

Soon enough the culinary menu will be expanded when the back room of the space is finished. It will include a full kitchen as well as a restaurant area (with a beautiful oak table over 4m long) and will be used for lunch and special events. For now, the dishes are prepared in a little caravan in the outdoor area, that is also used for breakfast feasts like Das Brunch.
It’s a space to watch, with many things to discover and expect. I, for one, am very excited to see what they’re pulling of in here.