Heimat #6: Soto Banjar (Stefanie Djie, Singapore / Indonesia)
Heimat doesn’t translate. And perhaps it doesn’t need to. It isn’t a concrete place, but a feeling, something that lives in memory, through smell, taste, and texture. All of us carry it, none of us need to agree on it.
Each month, we cook a classic that tastes like one kind of Heimat – across different kitchens and biographies – inspired by the people we live and work with in Berlin, grounded in the produce of our region. Find out more about our Heimat series here.
Heimat #6: Soto Banjar (Stefanie Djie, Singapore / Indonesia)
If there is one dish – or rather, one entire genre of dishes – whose powers of domestic comfort seem to inspire remarkable agreement across cultures, surely it is the good old-fashioned chicken soup. For the sixth instalment of our Heimat series, we turn to an Indonesian take on the theme: Soto Banjar, fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg and, we hope, capable of making the dank Berlin autumn feel a little more forgiving.
Our recipe patron this time is Stefanie Djie, a friend of the Nobelhart family and one of the people behind Skin Contact, a natural wine bar on New York’s Lower East Side. Born and raised in Singapore to Malaysian and Indonesian parents, she has spent the past three years living (and loving) in Berlin.
Soto Banjar, then. If you’ll indulge us in a brief spot of culinary ethnography, it is the soto of the Banjar people of South Kalimantan in Indonesia: one very particular member of an extraordinarily rich and varied family of soups, with its own distinctive spicing and culinary tradition.
In the Djie household, however, Soto Banjar was simply called Soto. The soup. It was only when we asked Stefanie to bring the recipe to our Heimat series that she began looking more closely at its origins. What we’re dutifully identifying here as Soto Banjar required neither geographical qualifier nor further explanation around the family table. Everyone knew exactly what was meant: the fragrant, warming chicken soup her father would cook whenever there was time on the weekends.
For the Nobelhart rendition, our chicken hails from northern Germany’s poultry pope Lars Odefey, while the potato fritters and assorted greenery come, naturally, from the sandy soils of Brandenburg. When it comes to serving the soup, however, we follow Djie family protocol: strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the finished dish. We’ll be handing you broth, chicken, boiled egg, cabbage and potato fritters separately, alongside chilli, lime kecap manis, the dark, sweet Indonesian soy sauce whose makers are famously not shy with the sugar.
What happens from there is up to you. More lime, plenty of chilli, a generous glug of kecap manis or just a little. Even around the Djie family table, every bowl tasted slightly different. Which is also precisely how we intend to serve it at our counter.
That particular counter, as it happens, has a special significance in Stefanie’s Berlin story. On her very first night after moving to Berlin three years ago, she found herself sitting at Nobelhart. Love had brought her here – love for her partner, she hastens to clarify; any sort of overt amorous attachment to the city was a little longer in the making.
“It’s not pretty like Paris, not sunny like California, not even particularly cosmopolitan. But,” she does concede, “it is transformative.” To really feel at home here, she says, you cannot remain a passive consumer; you have to participate, build relationships, become part of a community. “There’s a lot of beauty to be found in Berlin, but it takes something inside you to see it.” For Stefanie, much of that beauty resides in encounters with people, and in the places she finds herself returning to again and again.
Nobelhart has become one of those places. It’s a long way from Singapore, and yet, for a few weeks, with the Soto of her childhood on the table, rather closer than usual.
What:
Heimat #6: Soto Banjar (Stefanie Djie, Singapore / Indonesia)
When:
Monday to Thursday, from 5 October until 26 November 2026.
6:00 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
9:00 p.m. – end
Price:
€ 39.00 per person for Soto Banjar (seconds included), plus provisions for the road and Brita-filtered table water (still & sparkling).
You’re also very welcome to order additional courses from our current menu.
Booking:
Via the link.
Allergies & dietary requirements:
If you’d like to bring friends who don’t eat meat, we’ll happily find them a suitable dish from our current menu – although there isn’t a vegetarian version of the Soto Banjar itself. Allergens we unfortunately can’t avoid in the Soto Banjar include: Allium vegetables, garlic, celery, chicken, eggs, soya, pulses
Drinks:
Drink whatever takes your fancy – our drinks list is certainly long enough. Or let us make a recommendation: we’ll have a few particularly exciting bottles and wines by the glass lined up for the occasion. And for anyone not looking to have a tipple, there will of course be plenty of alcohol-free options, including our cold verbena infusion.
Heimat #6: Soto Banjar (Stefanie Djie, Singapore / Indonesia)
Each month, we cook a classic that tastes like one kind of Heimat – across different kitchens and biographies – inspired by the people we live and work with in Berlin, grounded in the produce of our region. Find out more about our Heimat series here.
Heimat #6: Soto Banjar (Stefanie Djie, Singapore / Indonesia)
If there is one dish – or rather, one entire genre of dishes – whose powers of domestic comfort seem to inspire remarkable agreement across cultures, surely it is the good old-fashioned chicken soup. For the sixth instalment of our Heimat series, we turn to an Indonesian take on the theme: Soto Banjar, fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg and, we hope, capable of making the dank Berlin autumn feel a little more forgiving.
Our recipe patron this time is Stefanie Djie, a friend of the Nobelhart family and one of the people behind Skin Contact, a natural wine bar on New York’s Lower East Side. Born and raised in Singapore to Malaysian and Indonesian parents, she has spent the past three years living (and loving) in Berlin.
Soto Banjar, then. If you’ll indulge us in a brief spot of culinary ethnography, it is the soto of the Banjar people of South Kalimantan in Indonesia: one very particular member of an extraordinarily rich and varied family of soups, with its own distinctive spicing and culinary tradition.
In the Djie household, however, Soto Banjar was simply called Soto. The soup. It was only when we asked Stefanie to bring the recipe to our Heimat series that she began looking more closely at its origins. What we’re dutifully identifying here as Soto Banjar required neither geographical qualifier nor further explanation around the family table. Everyone knew exactly what was meant: the fragrant, warming chicken soup her father would cook whenever there was time on the weekends.
For the Nobelhart rendition, our chicken hails from northern Germany’s poultry pope Lars Odefey, while the potato fritters and assorted greenery come, naturally, from the sandy soils of Brandenburg. When it comes to serving the soup, however, we follow Djie family protocol: strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the finished dish. We’ll be handing you broth, chicken, boiled egg, cabbage and potato fritters separately, alongside chilli, lime kecap manis, the dark, sweet Indonesian soy sauce whose makers are famously not shy with the sugar.
What happens from there is up to you. More lime, plenty of chilli, a generous glug of kecap manis or just a little. Even around the Djie family table, every bowl tasted slightly different. Which is also precisely how we intend to serve it at our counter.
That particular counter, as it happens, has a special significance in Stefanie’s Berlin story. On her very first night after moving to Berlin three years ago, she found herself sitting at Nobelhart. Love had brought her here – love for her partner, she hastens to clarify; any sort of overt amorous attachment to the city was a little longer in the making.
“It’s not pretty like Paris, not sunny like California, not even particularly cosmopolitan. But,” she does concede, “it is transformative.” To really feel at home here, she says, you cannot remain a passive consumer; you have to participate, build relationships, become part of a community. “There’s a lot of beauty to be found in Berlin, but it takes something inside you to see it.” For Stefanie, much of that beauty resides in encounters with people, and in the places she finds herself returning to again and again.
Nobelhart has become one of those places. It’s a long way from Singapore, and yet, for a few weeks, with the Soto of her childhood on the table, rather closer than usual.
What:
Heimat #6: Soto Banjar (Stefanie Djie, Singapore / Indonesia)
When:
Monday to Thursday, from 5 October until 26 November 2026.
6:00 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
9:00 p.m. – end
Price:
€ 39.00 per person for Soto Banjar (seconds included), plus provisions for the road and Brita-filtered table water (still & sparkling).
You’re also very welcome to order additional courses from our current menu.
Booking:
Via the link.
Allergies & dietary requirements:
If you’d like to bring friends who don’t eat meat, we’ll happily find them a suitable dish from our current menu – although there isn’t a vegetarian version of the Soto Banjar itself. Allergens we unfortunately can’t avoid in the Soto Banjar include: Allium vegetables, garlic, celery, chicken, eggs, soya, pulses
Drinks:
Drink whatever takes your fancy – our drinks list is certainly long enough. Or let us make a recommendation: we’ll have a few particularly exciting bottles and wines by the glass lined up for the occasion. And for anyone not looking to have a tipple, there will of course be plenty of alcohol-free options, including our cold verbena infusion.