ITA Bistro

"We’ve come a long way since humans started cooking with fire 780,000 years ago. While our brow ridges, attention spans, and portion sizes have shrunk, at ITA, fire still reigns supreme. Here, the ancient cooking technique is used to char the skin of pike perch, satiating Prenzlauer Berg’s hungry residents while they get an education in Sicilian orange wine. And while “responsible,” “well-travelled,” and “fun” might be plucked from a babysitter’s resumé, the locally-sourced adventurous Latin-American-inspired menu does check all of those boxes. Sitting in the modern Helmholtzplatz space with the black stone oven looming over us from the open kitchen, we get the sense a prehistoric ancestor might pop in, pick up a spicy melon oyster from its bed of pebbles, and slurp it down before tossing a pork chop into the fire." - Olivia Ladanyi