There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes with dining eight floors above Potsdamer Straße, watching Berlin unfurl beneath floor-to-ceiling glass. This elevated setting has been GOLVET‘s selling point since the restaurant opened in 2017. When the Michelin Guide Germany 2026 was unveiled in Frankfurt in June, GOLVET kept its star, a result worth noting, given that its new head chef, Nicholas Hahn, had taken over the kitchen only four months earlier. In a year when several Berlin restaurants were left waiting for upgrades that never came, holding steady counted as a quiet success.
Hahn arrived at GOLVET on the back of a strong run. Late last year, he was named Berlin Masterchef 2025, an honour bestowed by a jury of independent food journalists and industry experts who assess not just cooking but concept, service and atmosphere as a whole. It is a title with history: over 160 chefs and restaurateurs have received it, among them names like Sebastian Frank and Marco Müller. The jury’s verdict on Hahn was unambiguous: “Cooking is art. Nicholas Hahn is an artist.”
Seven years earlier, the panel named him Berlin’s Rising Star of the Year. Back then, Hahn was still finding his footing as head chef at Hotel am Steinplatz. “In 2018, I hadn’t really found my own signature yet,” he reflects. “Now I run the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant, I’ve built my team, I’ve developed my philosophy.”
That philosophy was forged, somewhat unexpectedly, in vegetable cookery. Hahn arrived at Cookies Cream restaurant with no formal background in vegetarian cuisine and had to convince owner Heinz ‘Cookie’ Gindullis during a trial. “I only knew top-tier vegetarian cooking in theory,” he admits, “but precisely because I come from classical haute cuisine, I can use that experience to treat vegetables the way you’d treat meat or fish. Techniques like smoking, fermenting and drying are, if anything, even more varied when applied to vegetables.” Cookies Cream already held its Michelin star when Hahn took over the kitchen. What changed under him was momentum: he kept developing the cuisine and, in March 2024, the recognition became personal too, with his first experience of a Michelin star for a restaurant under his leadership. The result was a cuisine built on flavour rather than dogma: “pleasure without sacrifice”, as he puts it and, ultimately, the reputation that brought him to GOLVET’s attention.
At GOLVET, that same instinct now meets a very different stage. Where Cookies Cream operates behind an unmarked door in a graffiti-strewn Mitte courtyard, GOLVET is made of glass, height and an open kitchen: a space set on the site of Thorsten Schermall‘s former nightclub 40 Seconds, which the Berlin entrepreneur ran for 12 years before converting it into a restaurant in 2017. Under the direction of bar chef Thomas Isabella and sommelier Andrea Agosta, the room has kept its identity through recent changes at the pass. Hahn’s brief is not to overhaul that identity but to give the kitchen a new voice: one built on “product diversity rather than luxury ingredients for their own sake”. He puts it more plainly himself: “I want to create a genuine culinary experience again with my cooking, without dogma. For me, it’s about enjoyment and very good food, first and foremost.” Vegetarian cooking, he adds, remains close to his focus even here.
Hahn’s first GOLVET menu, unveiled in February, is clear, purist and flavour-led: consistent with an approach he has spent years refining. It is also the menu that, four months later, satisfied Michelin’s inspectors. GOLVET’s star has stood since it was first awarded in 2017, within six months of the restaurant’s opening. This June’s confirmation comes just months after Hahn succeeded Peter Maria Schnurr, who left the kitchen in December 2025 after roughly a year in the role.
There is, inevitably, a question of scale behind any high-profile appointment like this. GOLVET is not a quiet, single-focus kitchen: an open pass sits within view of the dining room, a cocktail programme runs alongside the tasting menu, and the room itself, some 500 square metres over Potsdamer Platz, invites the kind of scrutiny a discreet address never has to face. Hahn’s task is to hold a consistent line across all of it: à la carte, chef’s table and tasting menu, while a room full of diners watches every plate leave the kitchen. It comes down to the same question that has shaped his cooking so far: how does one keep flavour, not spectacle, at the centre of the plate?
Off the pass, Hahn talks about balance in more personal terms too: raising a teenage son alongside a demanding kitchen job is, he says candidly, not something he always gets right. It is perhaps that same instinct for honesty over polish that has defined his cooking: a chef who talks about pleasure rather than ideology, about produce rather than prestige, and who now brings that sensibility to a dining room where, for once, the view might have to share the spotlight.
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words. Michael Ankermüller
edit. Huma Humayun
images. Courtesy of GOLVET
