If you are craving for amazing Levantine food, Berlin might not be the first destination you would consider travelling to. Since Chef Gal Ben Moshe opened Prism in the western part of the German city, you might have to reconsider your idea though. The chef is cooking with the best products from the region he grew up in, and transforms them in unique dishes combining the cooking style of the Levantine territory with the cooking techniques he learned from some of the best chefs in the world.

Location & Interior

Prism is located very close to where Moshe initially started Glass, in the western part of Berlin. The area is considered to be residential and bohemian bourgeois. In his restaurant, Gal Ben Moshe wants his guests to focus completely on the food. To avoid that they would be distracted by the restaurant interior, he chose for a minimalistic design where dark colors are creating a cozy atmosphere. The goal was to create a modern oasis, which represents Arabian nights at sea. So, sand and water, but at night. That explains the dark blue and golden colors. The whole concept works very well. As the restaurant is rather dark during dinner service, once food arrives on the table, guests forget the environment and are drawn into the plates of Levantine food, served by Gal’s wife and her team.

The Chef & the team

Chef Moshe grew up in Tel Aviv with parents that were real foodies. They brought him to the best restaurants in the city, something that has impacted him for life. Today he still remembers that at the age of three, his parents ordered trout with almond butter for him in a restaurant and the chef came out to see which kid decided to eat an adult kind of meal. So, it all started at a young age, but food remained a big deal for Gal throughout his life. A life that became more complicated at the age of fifteen. His parents decided to divorce, they could not pay the mortgage anymore and had to sell the house. Moshe’s father felt guilty that he made his son homeless, and to apologize for that, he borrowed money from his sister and took the young Gal to a very fancy legendary restaurant called Keren. The experience in that restaurant, with white table cloths and silver cutlery, made that Moshe fell in love with the concept of a fine dining restaurant. Out of necessity, around the same time, he started working in a fish factory that also had a restaurant. Almost from the start, he was begging the owners to let him work in the kitchen of the restaurant instead of in the fish factory, but they refused. One morning about a year later, after working the whole night in the factory, they asked Moshe to help in the restaurant because a chef was ill. From the moment he walked into the kitchen, he was convinced that his future was in that profession. Eventually, he stayed one and a half year in that restaurant and then moved to other restaurants in Tel Aviv. At the same time, he also had to serve in the military for two years. Once he got out of the army, immediately he moved to London. His ambition was to work in restaurant Maze. At that time, Jason Atherton was running the kitchen of Maze. His cooking style attracted Gal and he was convinced that this was the kind of cooking he wanted to learn. For one week, he went daily to the back of the kitchen, to beg for a job, but the team was complete and he got rejected at every visit. One day, he was waiting at the back again, and he heard a fight. A chef came out of the place angrily. Surprised that Moshe was still standing there and persisted so hard, they gave him the opportunity to start working, but unpaid. He had to prove himself first. Later he would also work with Marcus Wareing in London and with Grant Achatz in the United States. After his years abroad, he returned to Tel Aviv, and around that time his grandfather deceased and left him 50 000 euro. Suddenly Moshe saw the opportunity to finance the opening of his dream : his own restaurant. Gal’s uncle was living in Berlin. The city was upcoming and open minded and Moshe decided this was the place where he wanted his restaurant dream to come true. A few months later and 80 000 euro poorer, Glass opened. The chef would run that restaurant for five years.

At the beginning he cooked typical bistronomy food, but later the food evolved into more complex dishes. By coincidence, Moshe got in touch with winemakers from Lebanon. They had a good connection and decided to do a wine pairing dinner together. Gal tasted their wines and they were wild. That reminded him of Levantine food which is wild as well. So, he decided for one night to serve food of the region where his roots were, so that his dishes would pair better with the wines. But immediately he felt freed and had fun creating this kind of food. Inspiration came automatically, and also guests said this was the best dinner he ever cooked. Overwhelmed by this success, the chef decided overnight to change the whole concept of Glass and to start cooking Levantine food for a trial period of three months. Guests were raving about the food and the reviews were amazing. The restaurant also attracted a new audience and was always fully booked. At that time, Glass had many regular guests of which one couple that came at least twice a month. The husband of that couple was a real estate lawyer. When the rental contract of the building where Glass was situated came to a term, Moshe and his wife asked the lawyer and his wife for advice. That advice would change their life and career. With the couple they decided to close Glass and to open a new restaurant together, around the corner : Prism was born. Fast the restaurant started to get international recognition and the first Michelin starred followed as well.

In the restaurant, Gal is assisted by his wife, who takes up the role of maître and sommelier. The kitchen team, which consists of four people, holds a balanced mix between local German people and people from Israel, the home country of the chef. On top of that, there is a pastry chef, who comes outside of service hours, to prepare the breads and pastry.  The service team consists of a German and a German who has a Palestine Lebanese background. The entire team is very young and dynamic.

Gastronomy

The chef takes the best products of the Levantine region of East Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Israel and Northern Egypt, and translates those products into a new culinary language. Moshe aims at telling his own story with the food and reflects his roots in the dishes he serves. To do that, almost on each plate you can find elements which are cooked over an open fire, a cooking style traditional for the region the chef is originating from. Apart from that, it is clear the chef learned modern cooking techniques from top chefs such as Grant Achatz and Jason Atherton.

Some of the dishes we tried :

• Camel Tartar

• Bonito, persimmon, coffee

• White grouper, verjus, XO

• A5 Kagoshima Wagyu, carrots, yellow dates

The creative process of conceiving new dishes, happens in the head of the chef. Many of the products of the Levantine region, the chef ate his entire life. The taste profiles are embedded in his memory. Based on seasonality, he creates combinations in his mind and then starts cooking in the kitchen. The rest happens based on inspiration and creativity of the moment. Moshe has a clean and slick plating style. Each plate contains only a few ingredients, but they are prepared in a perfect manner and dish after dish you get soaked up by the amazing tastes of the territory Gal calls his roots.

Other dishes from our menu:

Products

The Prism team sources ingredients locally as much as possible, but if the quality does not meet their requirements or if they don’t find what they need, they import themselves. Most products are grown locally. Thanks to the Syrian immigration to Berlin in the past, a lot of high quality ingredients from the Levantine region became available in Berlin. Moshe cares about sustainability but quality seems to be his main driver in the decision-making process where to get his products from. In order to be able to control the quality even better, he rented a piece of farmland in the Northern part of Hamburg, which is in term of soil very close to Levantine soil. It is sand on a rocky terrain. He tried to grow Armenian cucumbers. Two months before they were ready, temperatures dropped below zero and everything was lost. At that time, the team was in the process of sourcing more and more seeds, but they lost too much money and had to cancel the project. However, it did not stop there. Lamb is the most prominent meat in the Levantine region and is very different from the lamb meat that can be found in Europe. Desperate to cook with the meat from his roots, which is much stronger in taste, Moshe bought a hurdle of sheep and is trying to raise them in Germany. The meat is not on the menu yet, but these kind of projects are good examples of how passionate Gal is as a chef.

Service & Wine

The atmosphere in the restaurant is relaxing and totally not stiff. The service team is friendly, accessible and at all times very professional. The music playlist is created specially for Prism by one of the most prominent DJ’s in Israel and consists of a mixture between electronic music and Arabic music. It emphasizes the whole concept of the restaurant that lives around the tension between being Arabic and being European.

The wine list consists of 500 labels of which most originate from the Middle Eastern region. Expect to taste wine from Israel and Lebanon and to fully understand the pairing with the food

Why go? 

Prism puts curiosity about the Levantine region in the guests who visit the restaurant. If you want to be blown away by amazing products, prepared in a unique way and paired with wines that you will not be able to enjoy in any other restaurant in Germany, you should go. However, don’t be surprised : you might walk out after dinner and start planning your trip to the region.