Does Berlin have a Chinatown? No – it has something better: Kantstrasse – Post Magazine Feedzy

It’s a late Thursday afternoon on a humid summer’s day and things have quietened down at Lon Men’s Noodle House. With the lunchtime rush over, the waiting staff are sitting down to eat while the chefs prepare the stew for the dinner service, the smell of ginger, garlic and onions thickening the air.

The restaurant’s owner, Hsien-Kuo Ting, is holding court, laughing and joking with staff while playfully teasing his wife, Show-Lian.

The Taiwanese beef noodle soup at Lon Men’s, devel-oped from Show-Lian’s decades-old recipe, has made the restaurant one of the most popular in the area.

Rarely without a queue of waiting customers, its regulars often rub shoulders with East Asian tourists and the rich and famous – politicians, television person-al-ities, basketball players, even the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, have all stopped by.

Pictures of celebrities posing with the staff adorn the walls of the two-decade-old, 40-odd-seater restaurant. Within just a few minutes of meeting the lively owner, it is easy to see how he is as much of a draw for customers as Lon Men’s’ signature dish.

“I’m always talking to my customers and the other restaurant owners on the street,” jokes 69-year-old Ting. “Everybody knows me around here. My wife calls me the mayor of Kantstrasse.”

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Theirs is the only Taiwanese restaurant on Kantstrasse, a lively, affluent street in Charlottenburg, in the west of Berlin, named after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Stretching from one of the city’s biggest railway stations, Zoologischer Garten, the thoroughfare runs parallel to the luxury shopping street Kurf?rstendamm, a kind of German Champs-Elysees – the iconic avenue in Paris.

From the station, walk west past one of the city’s oldest theatres, a series of high-end furniture stores and Schwarzes Cafe – a preferred haunt of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in the 1970s – passing the affluent Savignyplatz and two Chinese massage parlours that politely but firmly inform their customers that they “don’t offer erotic massages”.

From there to the street’s end, Kantstrasse becomes a restaurant-lover’s paradise. And while cuisine from Greece, Spain, Lebanon and India is all on offer, this is where the first Chinese restaurant in the German capital, Tianjin Fandian, opened 100 years ago.

Since then, the street and the surrounding area have become home to an intercultural and intergenerational East Asian community, with a cast that includes affluent Chinese and Japanese students, Korean-born political activists and tofu makers and, more recently, economic migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“Kantstrasse is a unique space, which, for me, really stands for west Berlin,” says Kimiko Suda, a sociologist, Sinologist and anti-racism researcher from western Germany who has lived in Berlin since the 1999.

“It’s a symbolic area and one in which everyone goes out. It’s not what people in some parts of mainstream German society call an ‘ethnic enclave’, which is how other areas are sometimes known in a derogatory way.

“Kantstrasse is a really popular area within mainstream German society, and it’s also an important meeting point for the Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean and Japanese communities.”

According to Erich G?tinger, historian and author of The History of the Chinese in Germany (2004), while there are records of Chinese migration to Germany in the 1820s, it was in the late 19th century that Chinese students – impressed by the European nation’s military might and scientific and philosophical advancements – started to arrive.

Many of these students studied at Berlin’s Technical University, a prestigious public institution offering classes in science and engineering.

With the Chinese embassy, a major railway station and the university all close to Kantstrasse, writer Frank Hoffmann says the street became “specifically for the upper and middle class, a hang-out for elegantly dressed Asian students from mostly wealthy, upper-class families”, with Japanese students also among this early cohort.

A community of students soon started to form, with official directory records showing that a Chinese Students’ Association existed in the city as early as 1902.

This, says G?tinger, grew to have about 300 members as well as an office at Kantstrasse 118 in the 1920s. (Political tensions back home impacted relations between these young students, with a reported clash in August 1925 between supporters of the Kuomintang and Communist movements.)

“At first it was just a handful of students but before long, word of mouth spread and more Chinese students started to arrive,” says G?tinger. “ Young Chinese, mostly men, came, but some women came, too, and these students came with the financial support of their families.

“Public transport was already developed in the area and it was very convenient for them to live in and around Kantstrasse to go to their lessons.

“These students were in a small room but that didn’t matter much to them. What mattered was their food. And while they could cook for themselves, what they wanted was to eat together in a restaurant.”

And so the Tianjin Fandian opened at Kantstrasse 130b in 1923.

During the years of the Third Reich, between 1933 and 1945 when the Nazis were in power, Berlin was also home to a small group of Koreans. One famous figure from this period was An Pong-gun.

An was an activist who, according to Hoffmann’s 2015 book, Berlin Koreans and Pictured Koreans, “must be given credit for introducing Korean fairy tales, classical literature, and short stories to Germans, and educating the general public about the Korean situation on lecture tours through all parts of the country”.

Alongside his activism against the Japanese occupation of Korea, An ran a highly profitable tofu business. In 1934, he and his German wife moved to Kantstrasse 132.

Hoffmann writes how the street had been developing under East Asian influence, then featuring China-Haus, a shop selling imported Chinese goods at No 130, and three more Chinese restaurants.

Tianjin Fandian had by then “long been known as the meeting point and hang-out for Asian students and intellectuals to debate politics”, with a sign at the entrance that read, “Japs and Brits are hereby kindly informed that we cannot guarantee your safety in this restaurant”.

As subjects of the Japanese Empire, a German ally, Koreans were indirectly protected by the Nazis’ so-called Aryan race law and were therefore treated differently from the Chinese. As Hoffmann discovered, there were several Koreans who were close to the Nazis “while simultaneously working with and for the Japanese regime”.

G?tinger says from this period onwards Kantstrasse and Berlin in general saw a dip in the number of migrants, which was reflective of Germany more widely.

“At the time, China had two rival governments and it was not clear how to deal with the Nazis,” he says. “The only ones who had very clear opposition to the Nazis were the Chinese Communists, many of them petty traders.

“And so during that period many had to leave Germany. Either they were deported or they moved to neighbouring countries like Poland, Russia, or in some cases, back home.”

Following Germany’s defeat and subsequent carving up between Allied powers, Berlin was further divided along political lines by the Berlin Wall, in 1961.

In East Berlin, the socialist German Democratic Republic saw the arrival of a number of students, contract workers and nurses from politically aligned communist Vietnam and newly established North Korea, while in capitalist West Berlin, Charlottenburg and Kantstrasse fell under British rule.

The city remained politically and geographically bifurcated until reunification in 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ting and his family came to Germany from Taiwan via Madrid, in Spain, in 1968, when he was 13 years old. His father found work as a chef while they settled into their new life.

One of his roles as a young man was as president of an association that supported new arrivals from Taiwan with visa and language help, and hosted cultural programmes showing Taiwanese films.

“Berlin back then was an interesting place and Kantstrasse didn’t have as many [mainland] Chinese people as today,” says Ting. “Back then there were more people from Taiwan.”

Suda says economic liberalisation in China in the 1970s and ’80s led to more disposable income and an increase in overseas travel, “while for people in Hong Kong, it was different because it was easier for them to travel to the UK and then onwards”.

It was this route that K. Wong’s family took in the ’70s to reach West Berlin. Today, she manages Aroma, a restaurant serving authentic Cantonese fare such as dim sum and sui gao soup.

Warm and welcoming in person, she says that while she is happy to share her story, she is not keen to include her real name or picture, preferring to keep a low profile.

Following her birth in London, Wong’s parents decided to move to West Berlin in search of economic opportunities. They ran a series of restaurants, which they gave up over the years to focus on Aroma.

Located at Kantstrasse 35, it is a few doors down from Lon Men’s and the Cantonese restaurant Good Friends, at No 30, all of which opened in the early 2000s. The three are the street’s most well-known and established East Asian restaurants and Wong says there is a friendly atmosphere among the restaurant owners.

“The parents of the owner of Good Friends and my parents were the first generation from Hong Kong to arrive here and our families know each other well,” Wong says. Despite being of the second generation of restaurateurs within the family, she doesn’t see a third emerging.

Her children, she says, work in offices and it’s not easy to find new chefs. “The rents are also rising,” she says. “It is not clear what will happen in the future.”

Amid the growing number of younger customers and business owners, there are some signs of what the future of the street may look like, though: bubble tea shops, J-stores selling manga, K-pop merchants, Korean karaoke bars, and the Japanese bakery Kame selling matcha hot drinks and sweet buns.

“We get a lot of Asian students and young German tourists who may come here after a visit to the J-store,” says Kame owner Machiko Yamashita, who opened the cafe seven years ago just off Kantstrasse, her art student vibe reflected in its cosy atmosphere.

Being among this younger crowd is part of the street’s new appeal for Jannik Starkarat, a 34-year-old software developer and Kantstrasse regular.

Starkarat used to come with his family as a child and continues to eat here. He has a long list of favourite dishes and places – fong wong rolls and tofu with pepper and salt at Good Friends, sushi at Kuchi Kant, spring rolls with minced chicken at Thai restaurant Chon Thong, and cheese dak-galbi ( spicy stir-fried chicken) at Korean eatery Han BBQ.

“Seeing a younger generation is what I also like about coming here,” says Starkarat over hot and sour soup at Good Friends. “It attracts students and young people who have a good job and are well educated, so it’s a class thing, a fusion between being racialised and privileged – people like myself.”

He says that since the area is centrally located and in an upmarket part of west Berlin, the gentrification impacting other parts of the city, in particular areas with historical diaspora communities, is unlikely to threaten Kantstrasse. Looking out onto the street outside, he motions with his hand, “There’s not much to fix around here.”

Yamashita, meanwhile, hopes to see more of a gastronomic community growing here in the future.

Over at Lon Men’s, Ting says he is finding it difficult to hire new chefs but the few he currently employs are mostly from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. “There is a reunion here,” he quips, stirring the stew as diners start to arrive.

Ting is preparing to retire at the end of the year, with the eldest of his three sons, Ido, taking the reins while he and his wife split their time between Taiwan and Berlin. So whatever happens with the other Kantstrasse businesses as contemporary tastes evolve, Ting, at least, will see a third generation of restaurateurs in the family.

“Lon men means ‘dragon gate’ and the dragon is my father’s Chinese animal,” says Ting. “He is 101 years old and still alive in Taipei so I hope I have some more years ahead.

“A lot more Asian businesses have opened here in recent years and I think this is going to continue,” he says, taking a sip of the stew. “I’d like to see dining culture from Asia expand from here across Berlin.”