Food Allergies in Berlin: What a Counter Must Tell You and Where the Allergen Hides

A guest on a Tuesday tour told me she had eaten nothing but supermarket fruit for two days. She was travelling with a celery allergy, her German ran out at "danke", and every counter she had tried answered with a shrug. She had assumed that asking was a favour she was requesting. In Germany it is the other way round: the information has to exist before you walk in, and you are entitled to see it.

That gap between what visitors think they can ask for and what the law already obliges a Berlin counter to hold is the whole subject of this guide.

A Berlin Imbiss counter. Nothing here is packaged, which is exactly the situation German law calls lose Ware, and where the allergen duty still applies.

Food allergies in Berlin: the rule is stricter than most visitors expect

Fourteen allergen categories are compulsory across the EU. They come from Annex II of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, and the German federal food ministry lists them in the wording you will actually meet on a menu.

The part that surprises people is the reach. In Germany the duty does not stop at packaged supermarket goods. Under the Lebensmittelinformations-Durchführungsverordnung of 5 July 2017, it covers food sold loose: restaurants, bakery and butcher counters, market stalls, canteens and the Imbiss on the corner.

A business may give you that information in writing, electronically, or simply by telling you. But the oral route comes with conditions, and they are the useful part:

• A written or electronic record of what goes into each dish has to exist.

• It has to be immediately and easily available to you on request, not filed somewhere in an office.

• A clearly visible notice has to tell customers that the information is given orally and that the written record can be asked for.

So "I think it is fine" is not compliance. There is a document, and you are allowed to ask for it. That single fact changes the conversation more than any vocabulary list.

Konnopke's under the U2 in Prenzlauer Berg. A Currywurst looks like sausage and sauce, and quietly carries mustard, sometimes celery, and often wheat in the sausage binder.

The two categories nobody sees coming

Ask a visitor to guess which allergens are hardest to avoid in Germany and you will hear nuts, or milk. The real answers are celery and mustard, and both hide in the base of a dish rather than sitting on top of it.

• Celery is inside the stock. Suppengrün, the standard German soup vegetable bundle, is carrot, leek and celeriac. Most powdered stocks contain it too. That puts celery into Erbsensuppe, Soljanka, gravies, the broth under Eisbein, and a great many sauces that never mention a vegetable.

• Mustard is inside the meat. Berlin Buletten are seasoned with it, remoulade is built on it, Kartoffelsalat is dressed with it, and most sausage recipes include it. You can refuse the yellow blob on the plate and still eat mustard.

The tool below puts numbers on that. Pick the categories you avoid and it shows you where they sit across twenty three things you actually get handed in this city, then reorders the list so the dishes carrying your category in the standard recipe move to the top.

My advice: work out your two or three worst dishes before you are hungry. Standing at a counter at half past one, with a queue behind you, is the wrong moment to discover that the soup was never an option.

One plate, three of the fourteen. The Frikadelle carries breadcrumbs, egg and mustard, and the creamy salad next to it usually carries celeriac.

Where it hides, dish by dish

This is not a list of banned food. It is a list of the places where the answer is not obvious from looking, which is where the question earns its keep.

• Anything with a sauce. Currywurst sauce, Döner sauce, remoulade, salad dressing and gravy are where mustard, celery, egg and milk all live. The visible ingredient is rarely the problem.

• Anything breaded. Schnitzel, Frikadelle and Königsberger Klopse all use Semmelbrösel and egg. Königsberger Klopse also contain anchovy in the classic recipe, which catches people with a fish allergy completely off guard.

• Bread rolls, including the plain ones. Soy flour is an ordinary bakery improver and lupin flour appears in some German baking, so a Schrippe is not automatically free of either. Sesame also travels between trays at a bakery counter.

• Beer. Berliner Weiße and every other beer is a gluten-containing cereal product. It is easy to plan the food carefully and then order the drink without thinking.

• The Vietnamese kitchens Berlin is full of. Fish sauce, peanut, soy and shrimp are structural in that food, not optional extras, which makes them predictable once you know to ask.

Soljanka, the East German soup that never left Berlin menus. The celery is in the stock it is built on, not in anything you can see.

Glutenfrei is a word with a legal ceiling

If you are coeliac, this is the most useful distinction in the whole guide, because it separates a promise from an opinion.

Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 828/2014 fixes what the words may mean. Glutenfrei is only allowed at no more than 20 mg/kg of gluten in the food as sold. Sehr geringer Glutengehalt is allowed at no more than 100 mg/kg. Those numbers are the claim, not a marketing style.

The crossed grain ear symbol goes one step further. In Germany it is licensed by the Deutsche Zöliakiegesellschaft under an audited European standard, so a product carrying it has passed an independent audit instead of a self-declaration.

The mirror image of that precision is the trace warning. A printed "kann Spuren von Nüssen enthalten" is voluntary and has no legal threshold behind it, which German consumer bodies have criticised for exactly that reason. Treat the fourteen mandatory declarations as reliable and the trace line as a hint about how the kitchen works, nothing more.

A Berliner Pfannkuchen from a bakery counter. Gluten, egg and milk are certain, the nut question depends entirely on the filling.

The sentences that actually work

You do not need good German for this. You need two lines, and the second one matters more than the first.

Name your category:

• Ich bin allergisch gegen Sellerie. I am allergic to celery.

• Ich vertrage kein Gluten. I cannot tolerate gluten.

• Ist das in der Soße drin? Is that in the sauce?

Then ask for the record:

• Haben Sie die Allergenkennzeichnung schriftlich? Ich möchte sie bitte sehen. Do you have the allergen information in writing? I would like to see it, please.

That second sentence is the one that turns a shrug into a document, and it works in English at most central Berlin counters too. If you want more of the vocabulary around ordering, my guides to reading a German menu and ordering at a Berlin bakery cover the rest of the counter conversation.

One practical note on menus. German businesses often footnote allergens and additives with small numbers or letters and a legend at the bottom of the page. That coding is not standardised nationally, so read the legend on the menu in front of you. A scheme you learned in another country will not map onto it.

A Fischbrötchen. Fish is obvious, the remoulade underneath it is where the mustard and egg are.

How I would plan a day of eating

Berlin is genuinely easy for this once you stop treating each meal as a fresh negotiation.

• Do breakfast at home or at a bakery you have already asked at. One conversation, repeated every morning, costs you almost nothing.

• Make lunch the flexible meal. Salad bowls, grilled meat plates and Vietnamese rice dishes come apart into components far more easily than a sauce-based German main does.

• Ask before you queue, not at the till. Berlin counters are fast, and a question asked while three people wait behind you gets a shorter answer than one asked at a quiet moment.

• Carry the German sentence written down. A phone screen held up at a counter works when your pronunciation does not.

• If you have several restrictions, look at the vegan Berlin guide as a shortcut. A kitchen already excluding milk and egg tends to be a kitchen that documents ingredients properly.

The city rewards the question. Berlin has been feeding people with every possible diet for decades, and the allergen record exists in almost every kitchen. What is missing is usually the visitor's confidence that asking is normal here.

If you want to start your trip with the historic centre explained before you go looking for lunch, my free walking tour begins at the World Clock on Alexanderplatz and runs about two hours through 11 stops and 16 places, finishing at Hackescher Markt, which is one of the better parts of the city to eat in afterwards. You can check the available dates and book a place whenever your trip is settled.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 6 photographs used in this article.

Berlin Imbiss counter and menu board: Alper Cugun, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Konnopke's Imbiss under the U2 in Prenzlauer Berg: Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Frikadelle with potatoes and vegetable salad: Silar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Soljanka with sour cream and baguette: Benreis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Berliner Pfannkuchen: Sebastian Koppehel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Fischbroetchen with pickled herring: Frank C. Mueller, Baden-Baden, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.