A Fond Farewell to Gaumenkitzel, One of Berkeley’s All-Time Greats

I’ve been going to Gaumenkitzel, the airy, sun-soaked German restaurant in West Berkeley, since my eldest child was an infant — my kids were practically raised on its cheesy, wiener-topped spätzle, which they love more than any mac ’n cheese. For twelve years now, we’ve dined at Gaumenkitzel at least once every couple of months — through good and bad economies and the worst of the pandemic, when the restaurant stayed afloat selling baked goods and big tubs of butternut squash soup.

It’s the sort of familiar, comforting place where none of us even need to look at the menu: I know I’m just going to order the pork schnitzel, which always arrives at the table perfectly crispy and golden-brown. It’s never once let me down.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, then, when the beloved restaurant announced a couple of weeks ago that it would be closing on March 24.

Chef and co-owner Anja Voth, who opened Gaumenkitzel in 2011 with her husband Kai Flache, says she has had a very difficult time staffing the restaurant ever since the start of the COVID shutdowns, to the point that the business became unsustainable. It’s an industry-wide problem, but one that Voth believes hit her European-style kitchen — where every cook needs to master multiple cooking techniques instead of specializing in a single station — especially hard. It became harder and harder to find staff who stayed long enough to be properly trained, she says. She and Flache decided the only solution was to close and perhaps look to open a smaller place.

Gaumenkitzel was never a particularly trendy restaurant. It sourced local, organic ingredients as diligently as any place in Berkeley but did so without a lot of fanfare. After its first few years of business, it rarely made the various best restaurant lists. Yet it persisted as a staple of the community. Oakland novelist Robin Sloan once called Gaumenkitzel his “favorite restaurant in the world,” marveling at how it managed to feel both fully German and fully Californian. “The place — its continued existence — just makes me happy,” he wrote.

It was the kind of warm and welcoming place where long-time Berkeleyites, in particular, would return again and again — for the schnitzel and spätzle, the fresh pretzels and obscure German beers, and jaw-dropping occasional specials like the butter-soaked emperor’s pancake. Voth recalls one older Jewish customer in her 80s or 90s — a Holocaust survivor who’d escaped Germany and hadn’t spoken German for 40 years. “It was a huge, huge compliment that she would come here,” Voth says. “You connect to people, and all of a sudden you’re a little bridge-builder.”

When another elderly customer passed away, his family found a whole stackful of Gaumenkitzel receipts in a drawer. They thought, “Oh, that must have been an important place for him,” and asked Gaumenkitzel to cater the memorial luncheon.

It’s that sense of connection and hospitality that Voth looks back on most fondly. “That’s what it’s all about in life,” she says. “It’s not about making all this big money or my ego, like, ‘I’m the super chef. I’m so creative.’ It’s this happiness that food can create.”

The restaurant doesn’t have any special events planned for its final weekend. In fact, Voth says, the past three weeks have already seen such an outpouring of people visiting to say their final goodbyes, it has been overwhelming. All she asks for is customers’ understanding as the restaurant slowly ramps down its menu.

Then, after taking a short break, Voth will begin actively looking for a new space to open a smaller version of Gaumenkitzel — one with a shorter menu but the same focus on providing comforting foods and a cozy, relaxed atmosphere. Somewhere in West Berkeley would be ideal, but she’s also open to adjacent cities like Albany and Emeryville.

Most of all, Voth says, she doesn’t want anyone to feel like they’re to blame for Gaumenkitzel’s closure. No one should feel guilty and think, “I wish I had gone more often” or spent more money.

“There’s no blaming at all,” Voth says. “We got so much support from everybody.”

Gaumenkitzel is open Wednesday to Friday from 4–8:30 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 8:30 p.m. Its final day of service will be on Sunday, March 24. Reservations strongly suggested.