Berlin: Three Scoops

 

In a city charged with so much history, what was astounding and refreshing about Berlin was the ice cream—or in my case, the sorbet.
 

This lightness melts instantly and stays only as a blissful and fleeting memory, which contrasts with the weight of the German capital’s monumental and bombastic architecture, some of it intended to last for 1,000 years.
 

That fleeting pleasure was also an escape from a heat wave and the worry of COVID-19, which emptied the city of most tourists—except us. It wasn’t the perfect moment for a big city vacation, which we timed to see our daughter who was on the move.
 

While we didn’t center our trip on an afternoon ice cream break, it allowed us to skip lunch, saving time and money, and see more of the city. However, the strategy assumes a big German brunch to start the day—also to be recommended.
 

Here’s my top three scoops:

• Chipi Chip Bombon. Warschauer Str. 12. This Italian-Argentinian-inspired cream shop uses organic hay milk to turn out ice cream such as Dulce de Leche and no milk for the pineapple and parsley sorbet. A great break after seeing the scary Stasi Museum or the delightful East Side Gallery, a stretch of The Wall painted by artists in 1989.
• Jones. Goltzstraße 3. Established by an award-winning French pastry chef, Jones churns out small batches and makes its own waffle cones. The flavors are as trendy as the Schoeneberg neighborhood where the place is located, like black sesame. I choose the cucumber and tonic sorbet, which I swore was spiked with gin. Check it out on a Saturday after enjoying the outdoor market at Winterfeldplatz.
• Fraulein Frost. 3 Manfred-von-Richthofen-Straße (with two other locations). The corner shop with ample outdoor seating was a local family refuge on this summer day for organic flavors like strawberry basil sorbet and peach gorgonzola ice cream. Perfect after exploring nearby Viktoriapark.

For our next get-away, we're thinking of a weeklong bike trip in France. We're drooling over the routes on this amazing website for discovering France by bike--in French, English, and other languages.

Photo: Courtesy of Jones.