Koriat Kuchenmanufaktur

Koriat Cake Manufactory: Cakes that are first drawn, then baked

A few steps from the Julius-Leber-Brücke S-Bahn station, in a quiet residential street on Schöneberg’s Rote Insel, stands a small shop with its own bakery. Aviv Koriat grew up in a kibbutz in the northern Jordan Valley, studied art in Jerusalem and New York, and worked as a product designer in Tel Aviv before coming to Berlin in the early 2000s. He started baking out of nostalgia for the craft of his childhood, and to this day, he approaches it like a designer: first the sketch, then flavor, texture, and production.

You can taste it. Besides carrot cake, cheesecake, and brownie, the display case offers varieties rarely found in Berlin: poppy seed-pear, almond cream with cherry and rhubarb, halva-orange-lavender scrolls, and the house specialty Oriental Orange, which also gave its name to the manufactory’s cookbook. One vegan and one gluten-free variety are permanent fixtures in the assortment. The shop is small; in summer, a few chairs are placed on the sidewalk. Whole cakes uniformly cost 49.50 Euros, can be ordered in advance, and picked up the next day. Nothing is shipped; the cakes are only available here.