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I was toddler-excited about visiting Coda, the two-Michelin-starred ‘progressive dessert’ restaurant in Berlin’s Neukölln neighbourhood. With an insatiable appetite for sweets, I was looking forward to putting myself and my teeth to the test over a multi-course menu, shovelling sweetened cream, syrups, biscuit bases and plump, filled pastry into my mouth, in the pursuit of an imagined pudding prize while my pancreas screamed for mercy. I’ve long harboured a desire to visit Will Goldfarb’s Room 4 Dessert. But I knew in my heart that ‘dessert’ was a loose term and that chef René Frank, World’s Best Pastry Chef 2022 according to The World's 50 Best Restaurants, was too clever to roll out the dessert trolley. And of course, this is Berlin and my perception of what dessert is and where it fits on a menu is just so… French (I’m British).
“It's very difficult to really say what a dessert is,” says Frank, as we sip drinks outside a bar in West Berlin, far from Coda in the East. “You cannot define it by the amount of sweetness. So I like to define it as a completely different type of preparation. Everybody has something in mind when you say dessert. But it's just from the French saying what a dessert is here in Europe. What I say is, ‘Actually, I don't do dessert.’”
René Frank
So, spoiler alert: don’t arrive for a meal at Coda expecting crème brulee and mille-feuille. The 16-course menu is dessert-inspired in terms of technique, texture, in terms of soul even – Frank’s heavily starred CV includes stints in pastry at Akelarre in San Sebastián and Nihonryori RyuGin in Tokyo, both three-Michelin-starred, as well as Head Pastry Chef at three-starred La Vie in Osnabrück, Germany – but you can expect heavy savoury tones from ingredients like aubergine, turnip, pork and parsley root (at time of writing), as well as playful surprises like a raclette waffle with kimchi (the perfect cheese toastie), a signature caviar popsicle and gummy bears made with golden beet. And no refined sugar, anywhere.
“We like to use a lot of vegetables and we treat them like fruits, for example, aubergine. Desserts with aubergine are common in Italy, Greece, in Turkey… but they always put a lot of sugar, so it tastes like pumpkin,” says Frank. That aubergine is served alongside pecans and a disc of apple balsamic. Together it looks like, well, a fancy French ‘dessert’. Another standout dish is a brioche made with gouda and drizzled with a turnip reduction. There are just 25 covers and everything is dark, apart from the food. “The only place I could do this is Berlin,” says Frank of his very Berlin restaurant.
Yellow tomato, chickpea meringue and lemon
Some people must be confused when they arrive though. Perhaps they’ve Googled it and know nothing about Frank’s mission.
“I’m happy for [the restaurant to be described as dessert-only] because when I wake up in the morning I think about dessert until I close my eyes at night. If you just have one topic then you can be very creative. But I’ve realised how difficult it is to communicate it. I'm always also thinking, should I change it?" he says.
For now though it’s a matter of 'build it and they will come'. “We just play with the inspiration from dessert and pastry. And with this, we're completely open to everything,” says Frank. Inspired by his time working in Japan and chefs’ dedication to constant improvement there, the Coda team are always looking to make the dishes lighter and healthier to “find a better sweetener” or “better products”. Oh and did I mention they make their own (very good) chocolate on-site, from scratch? For the team, “Coda is the perfect opportunity to see something completely different and to learn something completely different.”
Frank is dedicated to changing perceptions of what dessert is and to do that you have to start again, undo years of dessert conditioning. “In Asia, they have a different understanding of dessert. If you tell them dessert, they expect the French style of sweet, but they have their own sweet cultures,” says Frank. And perceptions are different closer to home too. “Austrian guests, they don't understand what we are doing so much, because they have their own dessert culture. In Austria, it's very typical to have dessert as a main course, sweet dishes prepared with flour or potatoes. For them it's also difficult to understand playing with desserts,” he continues.
This writer too. I finish a close to a four-hour meal at Coda satisfied, thrilled in places, but with a yearning for more sweetness. But is that simply because I’ve been conditioned to expect sweetness at the end of a meal or that I'm still fixated on the idea of dessert as I've understood it up to now? Frank would argue yes.
So, a dessert-only restaurant or just a new kind of restaurant? Either way, my teeth and pancreas are indebted to Frank and his team. I probably need to take a break from the puddings anyway.
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