The lift opens on the eighth floor, and before the first course arrives, Berlin lies before the windows: the Philharmonie, the Victory Column, the dome of the Reichstag, the television tower behind. A star of the Guide Michelin, held without a break since 2017, hangs over the house. You step in, and the view does what the first course usually does: it takes hold of you.
The Location
Golvet sits on the top floor of a 1920s building on Potsdamer Straße, across from the Neue Nationalgalerie, where Potsdamer Platz gives way to the Kulturforum district. Below, the traffic rushes; above, calm reigns.
The room is kept deliberately dark, so that the panorama takes the leading role: clear lines, reduced luxury, warm light. On the walls, nine street artists have left their mark, a raw, urban counter-tone to the precision of the plates. In the centre the open kitchen, before it the bar; at the counter you sit facing the cooks. The 1920s building carries history and shows it at once, through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Backstory
The house has a Berlin biography. For twelve years, from 2004, the top floor was a rooftop club that shaped the nights of the Loeser & Wolff building. In 2017 came the restart as a restaurant, and that same November the Guide Michelin awarded the first star, confirmed every year since. Golvet belongs to the 40 Seconds group of the entrepreneur Thorsten Schermall. The path there was not a straight one.
Before Hahn, a prominent predecessor left the kitchen after barely a year; a transitional period followed, in which the house regrouped, before Nicholas Hahn took over in early 2026. Born in Stuttgart in 1983, Hahn learned his craft at Schuhbeck’s Südtiroler Stuben and the Hotel Bareiss, before cooking under Vincent Klink at the Michelin-starred Wielandshöhe. As sous-chef at Berlin’s First Floor under Matthias Diether, then as head chef at Restaurant Steinplatz, where he was named “Rising Star of the Year” by the Berlin master chefs in 2018, his path led him via Andernach and the Griggeler Stuba in Lech am Arlberg.
From 2023 he cooked at the vegetarian Cookies Cream, defended the Michelin star there and was named Berlin Master Chef in 2025. His sous-chef at Golvet is Mirjana Biondić. Hahn cooks without dogma, with a declared priority of substance over staging: technical precision, real love of the product, modern techniques such as smoking and fermenting. The vegetarian line, his signature, he continues at Golvet without confining himself to it. That the star was confirmed in 2026 under his charge was the first answer to whether the change would succeed.
Contrasts on the Palate
Hahn’s cooking puts the product at the centre and works with the contrast of seemingly opposed flavours. What sounds austere on the menu unfolds a surprising logic on the palate. The foundation is a French-grounded haute cuisine, opened to the present, with borrowings from Japan, fermentation and smoke.
Two set menus are on offer, one of them vegetarian. The pointed-cabbage roulade, Japanese-inspired, joins Koshihikari rice and green pepper with smoked eel: the cabbage stays firm and faintly sweet, the eel’s smoke settling over it without drowning the clear vegetal notes, a play of warm and cool that frees the eel from its earthy reputation. Asparagus and king crab come cold, the asparagus briefly cured, the crab gently marinated: clear, straight flavour profiles in which the crab’s sweetness and the asparagus’s fine bitterness carry each other. The St Pierre arrives with horseradish and kohlrabi, the firm, mild fish set against the cool sharpness of the horseradish, which rises slowly in the finish and fades again.
As a counterpoint to the fine-limbed build stands a quail from hay and grill, the meat candied and forceful, a dark, smoky barbecue tone that grounds the lightness of what came before. A vegetarian course of aubergine, courgette and Café de Paris shows the other side: the vegetable as lead, the classic herb-butter seasoning carried onto summer produce, creamy, aromatic, needing no meat as a reference.
© Denzel Mure
Even the non-alcoholic pairing by bar chef Thomas Isabella is composed: white tea with thyme and ginger, hibiscus with tomato leaves and pepper, developed from extracts and ferments for each course, never too sweet, never too broad. Over it all lies a quiet assurance that needs no forceful gestures.
Substance over Gesture
Hahn comes from vegetarian fine dining and puts the vegetable at the centre as a matter of course, without raising it to a programme. One of the two set menus is consistently vegetarian, equal in rank to the menu with fish and meat.
His focus on the product’s own taste and quality means working with select producers, such as the poultry farmer Lars Odefey. Techniques like fermenting, smoking and drying serve not effect but shelf life and depth, in the non-alcoholic pairing too, which takes ferments seriously. Less staging, more substance, that is also a stance towards the product.
A Third Path
In a city whose fine dining likes to position itself between brutal localism and Asian flavour force, Golvet takes a third path. It joins the panoramic view, which no second starred house in Berlin offers, with a kitchen that bets on substance rather than spectacle.
Hahn cooks undogmatically, with a vegetarian line equal to fish and meat, and a precision that places the product above the gesture.
You sit 32 metres above Potsdamer Platz, watch the city light up in the dusk and eat a cuisine that stays calm and convinces for exactly that reason. A place for an evening that echoes long afterward.
Details
- Address: Potsdamer Straße 58, 10785 Berlin, 8th floor (32 m) of the Loeser & Wolff building on Potsdamer Platz, across from the Neue Nationalgalerie.
- Opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday from 6 pm; kitchen until around 9.30 pm, à la carte thereafter.
- Offer: two set menus (one vegetarian), five or seven courses; late-evening à la carte option; extensive international wine list, wine pairing and non-alcoholic pairing.
- Chef: Nicholas Hahn (Berlin Master Chef 2025), sous-chef Mirjana Biondić; one Michelin star, continuously since 2017. Open kitchen, bar with ferment-based cocktails (bar chef Thomas Isabella), chef’s table with a view into the kitchen.
- Web: golvet.de
