Berlin’s Neukölln doesn’t seem like the obvious address for a Michelin star. Kebab shops, Turkish grocers, tiny cafés spilling onto the pavement, and then there is Hallmann & Klee. Chef-owner Sarah Hallmann calls what she does ehrlich gute Küche (“honestly good cooking” in German), and in 2024, Michelin agreed, but Hallmann isn’t interested in defining her work. “I don’t like categories that much,” she says. “If I say it out loud, then I have to stick to it. And I don’t want to put a label on the food.”

Hallmann’s passion for food took root long before she entered a professional kitchen. Before cooking in a restaurant, she wandered across Africa and Asia, structuring her days around meals. “It was always, where do I go for lunch, where do I go for dinner? I tried fruits and cheeses I’d never seen before,” she recalls. “And when I saw local people eating somewhere, I thought, okay, this must be good. I would just look at what was on their plates and order the same.”

In her mid-twenties, she enrolled as an apprentice at Facil, the two-star French restaurant inside Berlin’s Mandala Hotel. “They showed me how amazing products can be and how important it is to get real flavour on the plate,” she explains. “In the end, taste is the most important thing…you’ll remember it.” From there, she worked in ambitious kitchens where vegetables came from their own gardens and chickens hung in aging rooms like Burgundy wine. She absorbed the French canon but never lost the instinct to chase flavours beyond borders.

At Hallmann & Klee, she presents two constantly changing six-course menus: one vegetarian, one with meat, but refuses to pin them down to any particular style. “It’s far from being a stiff fine dining place. It should feel like your living room…I want to give people the warmth of my food,” Hallmann says.

That same instinct guides her abroad. “I don’t like to go to fine dining places when I’m travelling because it doesn’t feel natural. I ask my host, Where do you go? Show me a nice spot,” she says. Whether it’s plastic stools at a noisy tapas bar in Tenerife or a three-star revelation in Copenhagen, Hallmann’s taste map leads back, inevitably, to Berlin.

Here are the restaurants she seeks out, eats at again and again, and is most excited to try next.

London

For Hallmann, London is a city where fire and finesse go hand in hand. “I like Brat because of the seafood,” she says. “It’s sustainably sourced, and I like the way they cook it over fire.” She also returns to the creative menus of Cycene in Shoreditch, where the draw is intimacy as much as the cooking. “It feels like you’re dining in someone’s home—if you know someone with a Michelin star.”

Paris

Paris is a quintessential pilgrimage for any chef, but Hallmann doesn’t chase the gilded addresses. “Chez Georges is a traditional bistro. I love it. And Frenchie [which offers contemporary cuisine], the [original] small one on Rue de Nil. It’s tiny, but very nice,” she notes. Hallmann is just as happy with patisserie and bread as she is with bistro classics. “Lenôtre is great, it’s been around since 1957. And The French Bastards have a few bakeries in Paris. I like them, too,” she adds.

New York

Across the Atlantic, her choices reveal a soft spot for both nostalgia and buzz. “I like Dame. It’s British food but done in a modern way,” she says. “And Kisa, it’s like a [really small] Korean diner. They have a coffee machine where you put in a coin to get coffee. I love that,” she explains. Then there’s the intimate downtown bistro Estela in Soho that Hallmann enjoys visiting. “It’s always vibrant, [and has] very good food.”

Berlin

At home in Berlin, Hallmann is just as loyal to independent kitchens as she is abroad. She loves going to Pinci, the Italian all-day café and bar. For something more special, she turns to Tulus Lotrek. “I had the best bouillabaisse of my life there,” she recalls. “It was the perfect flavour. There was a grilled scallop and a little bit of octopus and fish, and then this foamy, wonderful bouillabaisse—you don’t need more.” And for a more casual fix, Hallmann visits La Maison, a popular bakery and café. “It’s a bit of a day-drinking place in Berlin,” she says.

Copenhagen

This summer she’ll head north. “Copenhagen is a fantastic food spot,” she notes. “Going there is like a workshop for me. It’s also inspiration.” At the top of her list is product-driven, modern European restaurant Jordnær, owned by chef Eric Kragh Vildgaard and his partner Tina. “They have this fire in their eyes about gastronomy,” remarks Hallmann. “I’m so excited to go there.”

Elsewhere

And then there are the meals that lodge in memory not because of Michelin, but because of mood. “In Tenerife, they showed me a tapas bar,” Hallmann recalls. “It had plastic stools and high plastic tables. It looked horrible, to be honest. But at five o’clock, so many people came from work, hanging around, having beers and tapas and bocadillos. And this was the best food I’ve had in Tenerife. The atmosphere was incredible.”

Corsica is another touchstone. Here, she’s drawn to the island’s small producers, whose fantastic hams (the best she’s ever eaten, says Hallmann) and wines are a testament to the landscape. For Hallmann, the most powerful and authentic meals come from these encounters—a fresh baguette enjoyed with local sausages and cheeses, eaten casually in the countryside or by the harbour. As Hallmann says, “That’s the power of the people and the landscape.”

With files from Corrina Allen