i’ve wanted to write about this place around the corner for ages now… it’s a very normal café & bakery, the kind of place you have in practically every corner of berlin, filling the street with the smell of baked gluten at certain hours. the pastries are the opposite of fancy, the coffee is very meh… it isn’t hip or cool at all and for a reeeally long time, the background music was exactly the same. every. single. day.
and yet, we love it so much (and come back so often) they already know how we take our coffees without asking… it’s lovely!
there are 2 things rather special about zimt & mehl. first of all, it opens at 6am! in a city where a café that opens before 10am is hard to find, this is extraordinary. it allows us to come in early and do one of my favorite morning rituals: the early morning study sessions. we show up as early as 7am, get a coffee, sit down and just study something, while all around us, people read their newspapers and grab their coffees-to-go and sandwiches before heading off to work.
sometimes friends join us, and for one hour or so we go over online classes or educational podcasts, translate ted talks, study languages… anything goes, as long as it is learning or working towards a specific (not work-related) goal. right now i’m studying gut flora, paulo is doing a course on stocks and bonds and our friend max is learning korean. i’m an early morning kind of person, so i find it nice to jump out of bed and right into something.
second, they make omelets! big, fluffy omelets! you pick the ingredients, and they’ll make them for you. yes, they still come with bread (or this wouldn’t be germany), but if you skip that or push it towards the other end of the table, you’ll be fine for a no-frills, gluten-free meal. for people who are a bit picky about that, this is nothing short of a small breakfast revolution. plus, eggs are pretty much still my favorite thing – so this makes me happy.
and there you go: our favorite café in the whole of berlin! sometimes it’s the little things that count the most :)
4 replies on “zimt & mehl”
What educational podcasts do you recommend?
@Cláudio:
i’ve listened to a couple of courses on european history, both by professor david wetzel from uc berkeley:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/history-158b-001-spring-2013/id596255143?mt=10
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/history-162a-001-spring-2012/id496141591?mt=10
his quirky, enthusiastic style is not for everyone, but i quite like it.
lately i’ve been listening to dan carlin’s hardcore history: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history/id173001861?mt=2 his style is very different from wetzel’s, but really good.
i also like cooking+science, so I’ve watched harvard’s science of cooking: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/science-and-cooking/id399227991?mt=10, which they later launched as a coursera.
but there are dozens of others out there, and the ones done by universities are usually quite good. just browser itunes, and I’m sure you’ll find something you like! :)
[…] when we were in berlin, we had something called the early morning study sessions. i’ve written about them before, but in short, everyday we’d meet the same friends at […]
[…] in a neighborhood that seems to have taken a bit of a turn for the worse, our favorite café is still going strong, and it makes me exceedingly happy. other things we ate included hot pot, […]