Tucked away deep inside a former brick factory courtyard, Sofi has become the epitome of artisan bakeries in Berlin. The man behind it is the Danish chef Frederic Bille Brahe, who also runs Atelier September, Apollo Kantine & Bar as well as Kafeteria in the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Entrance
Sofi is specialised in sourdough bread, tebirkes (a Danish pastry), cookies and cakes. According to the shop, 90% of the flour they use is produced in a small organic mill in Denmark named Kornby.
Puff pastry and sourdough
We arrived at the shop at about 10:30 on a drizzling Saturday morning, and a queue had already started to form in the yard. The cashier faces the entrance while a small flight of stairs to the right leads up to a sitting area with a big common table in the centre and several smaller tables along the wall. By the time we placed our order, the place was completely packed.
For breakfast, we ordered a ham sandwich, a classic croissant and a blueberry Danish. I have heard rumours that coffee here at Sofi is nothing but mediocre, so we decided to take a coffee afterwards elsewhere.
Both the puff pastries tasted airy and were perfectly laminated. I especially liked the blueberry Danish, with its balanced flavour among the cream, the jam as well as the butter taste in the pastry itself. The croissant was also perfectly executed, but to me it seemed a tad bland and J was not particularly impressed either.
Compared with the puff pastries, the ham sandwich came as a pleasant surprise. The sandwich looked very simple: a big slice of ham squeezed between two thick slices of sourdough bread and a butter spread. The bread contained enough moisture to the point of being a bit spongy, while the well-balanced sourdough flavour lent a round, full taste to the ham and butter. Once you take the first bite, you will not be able to stop until you finish it.
Good flavors, but stinky service
Sofi was opened during the height of the pandemic in December 2020, with a declaration from the founder that people should make bread “in the right way”. We both enjoyed their simple, minimalistic and even elegant flavour palette in the bread and pastries, but it wasn’t until we encountered the service staff that we had our first true taste of their prescriptive approach. Nearly all the staff we met at Sofi had a grumpy face and somewhat dismissive manners. In Chinese, we describe grumpy faces without a single trace of smile as “stinky” (臭脸). At Sofi, I saw some of the “stinkiest” faces I have ever seen on a service staff in the whole Europe. When you order a sandwich, it takes a bit of time for them to prepare, and the waiters would eventually bring it to you. When it was our turn, the waitress held the sandwich in her hand and, with a stiff neck and eyes wide open, yelled to the crowd: “J!!” Very few times in my life have I heard call-outs of people’s names that contained so much unprovoked anger and pent-up dissatisfaction and I am from China.
If you are familiar with bakeries in Oslo, it is easy to spot the similarities between Sofi and Ille brød: both are artisan bakeries specialised in sourdough bread. The main difference, in addition to the service (people at Ille brød are super happy and sweet), is that Sofi might have more varities when it comes to pastries. What essentially connects them is the price. I still could not understand how young people with Berlin’s average salaries could afford Sofi on a regular basis. Maybe that is why all the people queuing before and after as well as sitting next to us were Danish. “Scandinavian prices for Scandinavian tourists,” J said, half-jokingly. Thanks to all these experiences, our advice for Sofi is to buy the pastries as take-away.