We cook Heimat
We are not translating the word.
Heimat is one of those German terms that resists clean English equivalents. It gestures at home, belonging, origin, memory – and at the same time refuses to settle into any of them. In Germany, the question of Heimat has never been innocent. Today, it is even less so.
Between complaints about the changing “cityscape” and statements like “this is no longer my Germany,” the word has hardened into a battleground. Who are we? What defines us? And who (or what) is cast as other?
Almost always, Heimat comes with a backward glance. A reach for something that no longer exists, but is imagined to have once been there: a better past, one that is more innocent, more manageable. The philosopher Ernst Bloch captured this precisely when he wrote that Heimat is something “that appears to everyone as childhood, yet it is somewhere no one has been.” Not a concrete reality, then, but a shimmering space between longing and narrative, between collective imagination and personal fantasy.
Indeed, what often presents itself as a rational debate – about culture, values, identity – may in fact circle something far more fragile: the desire for lost comfort, for a simple kind of warmth. Something like the long-past feeling of sitting at your grandmother’s kitchen table.
And perhaps that is why Heimat is easier to taste than to define.
A familiar smell in the kitchen. The anticipation of a favourite dish. With his madeleine, Marcel Proust gave us perhaps the ultimate evocation of that feeling: one bite, and memory comes alive, carrying us somewhere else entirely. Toward a sense of Heimat that is immediate, bodily, and stubbornly resistant to both language and politics.
This is the Heimat we’ll be turning to in 2026, and which you can experience with us from Tuesdays to Thursdays in our new dinner series. (Which, as with our duck and Schnitzel, runs in parallel to our regular 6 to 8-course supper.)
Over the course of the year, we’ll be focussing on various dishes that taste like childhood, like memory, familiarity and longing. In this, we’re not staying confined to a narrowly German frame, but we’ll explore the taste of Heimat wherever its origins may lie.
That, for us, is new. For over ten years, Nobelhart & Schmutzig has been about the food culture of Berlin-Brandenburg. About the produce of this region, and about the people who grow it, cook it, live and work here with us. But precisely because we take people seriously, this series dares to look beyond a “potato-centric” understanding of the city we’ve made our home, and invites voices from other cultures into our kitchen.
While we will feature one (or possibly several) of our own childhood classics, we’ll also be serving up dishes that evoke the same sense of comfort, the same emotional texture, from other cultural contexts: Bosnian, Vietnamese, Scottish, Arab. Wherever possible, we cook with the excellent produce of our region. Still, we may allow ourselves the occasional non-local spice. After all, Heimat shouldn’t be a purity test.
The ideas and recipes come from the people who already live and work alongside us in Berlin. In that sense, we’re merely exploring the city as it actually exists, as a place where diversity isn’t a now-hidden slide in a corporate PPT deck, but simply a fact.
We are not naïve about this. Food, too, can romanticise and simplify. A dinner at our long counter doesn’t solve anything. And still. If we insist, at Nobelhart, on putting Berlin-Brandenburg on the plate, then this series is long overdue – while the question of Heimat remains both timeless and urgently present.
We cook Heimat
Heimat is one of those German terms that resists clean English equivalents. It gestures at home, belonging, origin, memory – and at the same time refuses to settle into any of them. In Germany, the question of Heimat has never been innocent. Today, it is even less so.
Between complaints about the changing “cityscape” and statements like “this is no longer my Germany,” the word has hardened into a battleground. Who are we? What defines us? And who (or what) is cast as other?
Almost always, Heimat comes with a backward glance. A reach for something that no longer exists, but is imagined to have once been there: a better past, one that is more innocent, more manageable. The philosopher Ernst Bloch captured this precisely when he wrote that Heimat is something “that appears to everyone as childhood, yet it is somewhere no one has been.” Not a concrete reality, then, but a shimmering space between longing and narrative, between collective imagination and personal fantasy.
Indeed, what often presents itself as a rational debate – about culture, values, identity – may in fact circle something far more fragile: the desire for lost comfort, for a simple kind of warmth. Something like the long-past feeling of sitting at your grandmother’s kitchen table.
And perhaps that is why Heimat is easier to taste than to define.
A familiar smell in the kitchen. The anticipation of a favourite dish. With his madeleine, Marcel Proust gave us perhaps the ultimate evocation of that feeling: one bite, and memory comes alive, carrying us somewhere else entirely. Toward a sense of Heimat that is immediate, bodily, and stubbornly resistant to both language and politics.
This is the Heimat we’ll be turning to in 2026, and which you can experience with us from Tuesdays to Thursdays in our new dinner series. (Which, as with our duck and Schnitzel, runs in parallel to our regular 6 to 8-course supper.)
Over the course of the year, we’ll be focussing on various dishes that taste like childhood, like memory, familiarity and longing. In this, we’re not staying confined to a narrowly German frame, but we’ll explore the taste of Heimat wherever its origins may lie.
That, for us, is new. For over ten years, Nobelhart & Schmutzig has been about the food culture of Berlin-Brandenburg. About the produce of this region, and about the people who grow it, cook it, live and work here with us. But precisely because we take people seriously, this series dares to look beyond a “potato-centric” understanding of the city we’ve made our home, and invites voices from other cultures into our kitchen.
While we will feature one (or possibly several) of our own childhood classics, we’ll also be serving up dishes that evoke the same sense of comfort, the same emotional texture, from other cultural contexts: Bosnian, Vietnamese, Scottish, Arab. Wherever possible, we cook with the excellent produce of our region. Still, we may allow ourselves the occasional non-local spice. After all, Heimat shouldn’t be a purity test.
The ideas and recipes come from the people who already live and work alongside us in Berlin. In that sense, we’re merely exploring the city as it actually exists, as a place where diversity isn’t a now-hidden slide in a corporate PPT deck, but simply a fact.
We are not naïve about this. Food, too, can romanticise and simplify. A dinner at our long counter doesn’t solve anything. And still. If we insist, at Nobelhart, on putting Berlin-Brandenburg on the plate, then this series is long overdue – while the question of Heimat remains both timeless and urgently present.