Deals

Good chicken in Berlin is weirdly expensive

On this day of discounts, in this season of sales, I am prompted to reflect on the deal that is living in Berlin. Is it a deal? How good a deal is it?

At a Thanksgiving dinner held last Sunday (since, of course, no one had Thursday off), a Chilean mom told me she doesn't think Berlin is any cheaper than Paris or London, not if you like living the same way here that you did there. She described her time in London as having been smoothed by regular use of her dad's credit card, so I think she may not speak for most Berliners, even of the expat-gentrifier class. I think she means that if you live in a big flat in Mitte, on a nice street like Auguststrasse or Linienstrasse, in a well-renovated building that has succeeded in scaring away all graffitists, you're paying almost the same as you would in Marylebone or the 7th arrondissement, your Roche Bobois sofa costs the same, your sushi costs the same, and your coffee still costs 4 Euros, or a little more with oat milk.

Cappu-cheapo, depending where you go

What is striking, and still very different from those cities or New York, is how fast prices drop to what I would call neighborhood levels as soon as you're outside the slivers of Berlin in which foreigners outnumber locals. In the upper part of Prenzlauer Berg where we live (still a gentrified neighborhood, with many foreign residents), a generously sized two-bedroom apartment costs half what a similar apartment in a nice part of brownstone Brooklyn would, even though here we are within a pleasant 30-minute walk (or 10-minute bike ride, or 15-minute tram ride) of the most expensive areas of Mitte, whereas brownstone Brooklyn is considerably farther from the fanciest parts of Manhattan, and not really accessible to them on foot at all.

What about the smaller things, the things that you, a refugee from some more expensive city, can now more easily afford because of your cheaper rent? Here too, prices exist in a two-tiered system, with most things being cheaper for most people, except where everyone is a foreigner and nobody cares. A cappuccino, for instance, costs 3.50 Euros (close to $4) at Bonanza, a well-established coffee roaster with two large, minimalist shops where German is hardly heard and the line is likely to contain several people reading Japanese guidebooks. Meanwhile, at Kajumi, my favorite neighborhood shop, a great cappuccino costs 2.40 Euros, about 30 percent less. I am always amazed that a cappuccino and a chocolate croissant (or plié, really) cost 4 Euros; at Bonanza this order costs 6.50 Euros, and at Blue Bottle in New York it would be $8.50 for a product that isn't quite as good.

Negronis for all!

Enough about coffee. How about a 750 mL bottle of Campari for 10 Euros (the price at Rewe supermarkets, as compared to about $30 in the US)? A Rittersport chocolate bar for 1.50 Euros at a Späti (which is like a bodega in New York, where that bar might cost $4)? A pint bottle of delicious Augustiner Lager for 1.70? Even on draft at a bar, a beer is rarely more than 3 Euros, often less than a sparkling apple juice or a bottle of water.

I'm not done: a package of incredible sea-buckthorn gummy bears at the pharmacy, organic and made in Germany? 1.50 Euros. An ice-cream cone at the vaunted Hokey Pokey on our street, which, contrary to my theory, caters to a great many tourists, and uses expensive ingredients in its sometimes-weird flavors, like Laphroaig whiskey, whole figs, and Danish licorice? 1.80 Euros. Naturally, German-made products tend to be much cheaper than in the US (Weleda and Dr. Hauschka products, for instance).

This is to say nothing of the scarcely believable gifts from the government that are actually a much bigger deal: daycare in Berlin is free (technically, 63 Euros a month at ours, to supplement the snack  and excursion budget; compare with $3000 at Bright Horizons in Boston or New York). Having a child nets you about 2500 Euros a year in Kindergeld payments, until they're 18 (that's 45,000 Euros). This, I think, is intended for diapers, Kita fees, eventually summer camps (also drastically cheaper here), and, perhaps, those few items that are actually more expensive here.

This one's on Merkel

The street where I am sitting at my cafe, Dunckerstrasse, is a kind of Soho for children's clothing, where multiple shops sell Scandinavian toddler snowsuits for 150 Euros, German fluffy-wool body suits for 100 Euros, and tiny Italian sneakers that will be outgrown before the season is over for 90 Euros. These items are all of superb quality and are intended to last through multiple childhoods. The Finnish rainwear maker Reima, in a kind of durability brag, puts five lines for children's names on its tags.

Biomärkte, organic supermarkets, are also pretty expensive. You can't find an organic chicken for less than 20 Euros, and produce costs about what it does at Whole Foods. But even here, European cheeses like Comté and Roquefort cost half what they do in the US, before Trumpian tariffs. Wine prices vary, with some choice German producers (like Enderle & Moll, Schmitt, and Ziereisen) costing much less than in the US, where they are, anyway, hard to find. Yet at Viniculture, a great store in Charlottenburg, you end up spending as much as you would at any store in New York. West Berlin is strange that way: bourgeois forever, it's becoming cheaper to live in because of young people's lack of interest (like the Upper East Side), but its shops and restaurants charge Paris and London prices.

All of this talk is, I realize, insensitive to the majority of people in Berlin, who are from here or have lived here a long time, and to whom Berlin rightly seems more expensive than ever, because it is. The reason prices are lower here is that people also make less money, and the cost of living is rising much faster than people's ability to pay for it. Berlin is a good deal only relative to other cities, not to its own past self.