Sathutu — Restaurant in Berlin

We passed by as we were walking through the neighbourhood and despite not having a reservation and being fully booked, the gracious staff members went out of their way to assemble their make-shift outdoor bar table for us, which was perfect for our spontaneous drop-in and was a very lovely experience overall. If you're looking to have a more formal dining, I would definitely advise you to make a reservation in advance.

We ordered drinks to start off. The manager, Silke, took care of our table for the night and our drinks came out quickly despite it being busy. The drinks menu was great, I started with the Passionfruit Martini and my friend got the Floral Sour mock-tail, we followed that up with the Coconut Paloma and yet another Floral Sour (the best mock-tail my friend has ever had, in his words).

Do not come here without ordering the Bhatura. It is quite literally the best dish I've ever eaten. Perfectly balanced in flavour and texture, it's something you can't miss. It looked so good that I forgot to take a photo and by the time I remembered it was already gone.

Sathutu is, by far, one of the best dining experiences you can have in Berlin. Everything is so beautifully curated; from the recipes to the plating, the atmosphere to their knowledgable and detail-oriented service team. This place deserves all of the success that comes its way, and it's only gotten better each time...

This restaurant is… meh. Food is okay, but you’d honestly find the same or better at any small authentic Mom & Pop Sri Lankan place. The chicken was pretty good, but then, it was just fried chicken: oily, nothing different or interesting about it. My burrata aubergine dish contained so little burrata that everyone at the table commented on how stingy it felt. The Kiri Hodi had no depth or complexity, but fine, it’s a simple dish after all. All in all, you can see the theme here: basic dishes that in all fairness to their origin SHOULD be humble and affordable. So why then is it so expensive? €25 for like 3 small pieces of chicken?!

Possibly the biggest sin however was the lack of storytelling and love for the culture. On the physical menus, minimal care was put into describing the dishes or elucidating the craft behind them. No effort was put into differentiating the space. It was totally forgettable and felt like every other overhyped Berlin restaurant with quasi-industrial design.

Honestly think you’re a bit of a sucker to come here more than once —knowing how basic the dishes are and the prices of the ingredients they’re using— when so many nice, authentic and rationally priced places exist.

Perhaps the weirdest part of this is the owner stalking people who leave reviews on Instagram and making assumptions about their nationality and...

Food was great! We ordered almost the whole menu and the only ‘average’ meal was the chicken (wasn’t really crispy) - still nice tho. The rest was well balanced, everything made sense and I liked the plating as well.

Service could and in my opinion should have been better and attentive. We are still talking about a 100€ per person restaurant in Berlin. First we waited for 20 minutes to get our table ready, even though we came at the time when we reserved. It started raining and they didn’t have an umbrella to cover us, inside it was too hot to enjoy so there was no alternative. Didn’t get to try the first bottle of wine, we just got it poured in 4 glasses. The second one we did. Both were good tho.

Cocktails were the biggest dissapointment. They sat on the counter for a good 30 minutes, if not more, while we waited for out dessert (which we didn’t have a problem with). And of course they got super watery. They received the feedback well but could handle the situation much better - we got 1 cocktail out of the bill, even though we almost didn’t touch 3 out of 4, basically only tried them. For me personally it would have been better to not get anything out of the bill rather than only 1 out of 4 - even though all of them tasted like pure alcohol mixed with water. A good old 4 espressos on the house would have done...