Despite recent waves of gentrification, Berlin is still a city full of artists. While some (including Wolfgang Tillmans and Katharina Grosse) are world-renowned, it’s another cast of characters who keep the city strange and unpredictable. There’s the avant-garde choreographer Florentina Holzinger, for example, known for staging operas with plentiful fake blood, and the 82-year-old fashion knitwear designer Claudia Skoda, who’s often seen out at nightclubs. Then there’s the artist Oliver Prestele, 52, who can be spotted around town wearing fluffy dog-hair hats and giant wooden clogs. Long obsessed with all aspects of traditional Japanese culture, he is one of the city’s most passionate ceramists, a co-owner of some of its most successful Japanese restaurants and a gatherer of people. At the weekly Sunday dinners he hosts at his atelier, one might meet any number of creative Berliners, from the Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo to the German Japanese classical violinist and artist Ayumi Paul.
Located in the Uferhallen, a canal-side complex of artists’ studios in the developing Wedding neighborhood, Prestele’s 2,000-square-foot, two-floor space contains a glassed-in room that he uses as a ceramics studio and a large open kitchen and fermentation laboratory lined with plants and pottery. Last year, he made soba noodles there every Sunday until he was satisfied that they were perfect. On the second-floor mezzanine, he’s installed an irori, a traditional Japanese sunken hearth, where he sometimes cooks nabe, Japanese hot pot.
Born and raised in a small village in Bavaria, Prestele moved to Berlin in the 1990s to study product design at the Berlin University of the Arts, where one of his professors, a Japanese sculptor, instilled in him a fascination with Japan. After leaving university, he traveled to that country as often as he could, obsessively teaching himself to cook ramen. In 2001, he built a wooden ramen cart and began serving noodles in different spaces around Berlin’s then-gritty Mitte neighborhood. “Everything about it was illegal,” he says. He soon began catering for photographers including Peter Lindbergh, and in the mid-2000s, Prestele partnered with the Vietnamese restaurateur Ngu Quang Huy to open the ramen restaurant Cocolo, which now has two locations.
Last February, Prestele also opened Niko Izakaya, a Japanese-style pub on the border of the Wedding and Mitte neighborhoods, where he serves takes on Japanese bar food like saba shioyaki (grilled blue mackerel) and kabocha korokke (deep-fried pumpkin croquettes). The restaurant changes its menus slightly with the seasons, and Prestele and his team, many of whom are from Japan, never stop experimenting. On a recent Sunday evening he invited some friends over to test a few new dishes.
The 12 guests included the Japanese architect and consultant Hiromu Suzuki, 45, and his wife, Mai Suzuki, 46, an actress who sometimes also works at Niko as a server. The couple love to cook and helped Prestele prepare many of the meal’s dishes. Vo, 49, was there with his partner, the German photographer Heinz Peter Knes, 51. They were joined by Vo’s nephew, a fashion model and student, and niece, who is currently learning about fermentation from Prestele and working in the garden at Güldenhof, Danh Vo’s farm and art space outside Berlin. Sissel Tolaas, the 63-year-old Norwegian artist and chemist known for her work with scents, chatted with the 55-year-old Swiss actress Bettina Stucky, an ensemble member of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus theater in Hamburg.
Prestele arrived at his studio around 4 p.m. with a cut of deer he’d purchased from a hunter and driven over from Vo’s farm. He’d also picked up a bounty of winter vegetables, including some from Vo’s neighbors, the farmers Philip and Lena Adler. On the studio’s main dining table — which Prestele had fashioned from a hospital bed so it can be raised and lowered — various Japanese pickles had already been laid out for guests to snack on. Around 6:30, more dishes arrived at the table: black kale ohitashi with purple dashi; eggplant, venison and hata hata fish dishes, all grilled, and a flat bamboo basket loaded with fresh winter greens served with a zesty miso dressing. Later, everyone gathered at the irori around a flavorful nabe made with chicken, cabbage, daikon and pumpkin.
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