Punk And Verve Hit Prenzlauer Berg

There is perhaps no Sunday morning pastime more beloved by Berliners than das Frühstück, an extended brunch that permits bleary-eyed morning diners to linger over a glass of Bavarian beer and neutralize a pleasure-saturated weekend with a hand-rolled cigarette and an almond milk, double-shot cappuccino.

Lucky Leek, a recently opened vegan eatery in Prenzlauer Berg, provides such an experience, infusing the Berliners' tradition of leisurely breakfasting with a plant-based twist.

With a kitchen nestled inside a snug, half-basement building with small windows, eye-level to the yawning, pedestrian-plenty Kollwitzstraße, Lucky Leek's smattering of outdoor picnic tables and benches are marked by massive, mandarin-colored umbrellas.

German-born co-owner Seb Happe says brunch-goers might not find the restaurant, which is indicated with a nondescript sign; "Lucky Leek" is stenciled and painted directly onto the exterior in cursive script.

"We didn't want to create a place that was trendy or pricey-looking," Happe says of his and co-owner Jojo Hartanto's aesthetic inclinations.

"Just a good, clean, honest space where our guests can feel cozy."

Seb and Jojo (pronounced yo-yo) opened Lucky Leek in April of this year. The two are business partners, as well as a couple, and they have an endearing, punkish air about them. Blue-eyed Seb wears a backwards ball cap and has stretched ears accessorized with onyx-black plugs, roughly the size of a 2 Euro coin. Jojo, with tousled pigtails and fork-and-spoon medallions on a chain dangling from her left ear, wears boyish clothes and beat-up sneakers-what a woman wears when she is a chef who oversees a busy back-of-house.

They are a perfect pair and a seemingly unlikely fit in Prenzlauer Berg, whose closest micro-cultural analog might be New York's Park Slope, a neighborhood inhabited by the artsy-gentry demographic.

Seb and Jojo live in the decidedly less-manicured Neukölln district, where they visit their neighborhood's local markets to procure the seasonal produce that is the centerpiece of Lucky Leek.

At their restaurant, there is no set menu; just as local harvests vary, so do the fickle whims of Jojo's gastronomic inventions.

"I bore easily," she says, "and I object to recipes." Her culinary process is intuitive; she simply senses what farm-fresh ingredients will combine to please diner's palates and forges ahead, developing dishes in medias res.

This isn't to say her laissez faire approach is naive. Not only are her variegated, literally irreproducible dishes flavorful and often astonishing in their simplicity, (think California-style cuisine) but they are also born of the technical expertise she cultivated during her formal training at culinary school in 2000.

At the time, Jojo says, "I prepared meat, and I ate it." Then, laughing, she went on to explain that she became vegan in what she describes as the "classic" way: One day a trigger was pushed in my head.

Jojo and Seb named Lucky Leek by riffing off the name of the classic cartoon character Lucky Luke, first created mid-century by Belgian comics artist Rene Goscinny. Lucky Luke is a cowboy whose adventures occur in America's fabled Wild West, and the eponymous hero is known for his lightning-quick draw: Lucky Luke can shoot faster than his own shadow.

Abigail Wick is an American freelance writer living and working in Berlin. She is the founder of the food blog Eating With Abs, an in-house editor for Unlike international city guides, and a weekly love and relationships columnist for
EcoSalon magazine. For the NPR Berlin Blog, Abigail will be writing "Berliner Veg," a city-specific culinary arts column that highlights plant-based gastronomy in Europe's vegetarian capital.