Photo by Matthew Berks. Huadou, just off Rosenthaler Platz, process the beans it uses for its homemade soy products in-house.
Veganism may be more widespread than ever, but one of its mainstays, soy, has a bad rep: South American forests are being destroyed to farm the beans, which are then shipped halfway across the planet to be processed into beige goop. When Mengya Huang and Sibo Peng moved to Germany to study architecture in 2012, they were appalled to find that Berlin couldn’t offer them the kind of homemade soy products they’d grown up on in Tianjin, China. In November, they opened their ‘soy concept store’ Huadou which includes a café and workshop programme. The space, just off Rosenthaler Platz, is bright and calm; its Chinese-imported bamboo seats and marble counters make for a highly instagramable backdrop for tucking into a miniature matcha sponge cake layered with soy cream (€3.50), or sipping on a rich soy milk cappuccino (€3.20). All beans come from Bavarian bio-farm Lex and are processed in-house. The weekly 2.5-hour workshops (€65 per person) use traditional marble mills designed by Berlin’s Yuue Design Studio (buy your own for €890 if you feel like committing to the homemade tofu life) to allow you to make wholesome soy dishes from scratch. You can enjoy your creation on the spot and will go home with a fresh 100-200g batch of tofu. For ‘milk’, sample their choice of almonds and goji, adzuki beans and dates, or pure homemade soya milk (€3.50 for 300ml) as you’ve never tasted before.
Huadou | Linienstr. 205, Mitte, Mon-Fri 8-18, Sat-Sun 9-18.
