KaDeWe Berlin: A Visitor's Guide to the Grand Store and Its Famous Food Hall

Ask a Berliner where to take a visitor who says they want to "see something grand," and a surprising number will send you to a shop. Not a museum, not a palace: a department store on a busy west-Berlin corner, open since 1907, with a sixth floor that people fly in to eat their way through. That store is KaDeWe, and once you understand what it actually is, it makes sense why it keeps ending up on Berlin itineraries.

Here is my honest take before the details. KaDeWe is worth an hour, mostly for the food hall, and it works best when you treat it as its own small outing rather than a quick detour. It sits well away from the historic centre, so a rushed ten-minute look on the way to somewhere else usually just means a crowded escalator and no idea what you saw.

What KaDeWe actually is

KaDeWe is short for Kaufhaus des Westens, "the department store of the west." The name is a leftover from a divided city: this was the flagship store of West Berlin, the shop window of the western half during the Cold War, and it still carries that slightly showy, we-have-everything energy today.

The numbers back up the reputation. It spreads over more than 60,000 square metres across eight floors and is the largest department store in continental Europe, second in the whole of Europe only to Harrods in London. On a normal day it pulls in tens of thousands of visitors. Most of the building is fashion, beauty and home goods, arranged floor by floor the way a grand old store should be.

The sixth-floor food hall: a champagne bar and deli counters, not your average supermarket.

But almost nobody visits KaDeWe for the socks. They come for the sixth floor.

The sixth floor: Berlin's most famous food hall

The Feinschmeckeretage, the gourmet food hall, takes up the sixth floor and spills into the seventh. Locals just call it "the KaDeWe food hall," and it is the one part of the store I would tell any visitor to see even if they buy nothing.

Picture a market crossed with a delicatessen. Around 35 counters sell oysters and champagne, fresh fish on ice, whole walls of cheese and cured meat, chocolate, coffee, tea, and a pastry section that is genuinely hard to walk past. Many counters double as small standing bars, so you can order a few oysters, a glass of wine or a slice of cake and eat it right there.

You can graze counter to counter. Entry is free, so this floor works as a browse, not just a shop.

Two practical things I always mention. First, there is no entry fee and no obligation to buy. Walking the sixth floor and looking is completely normal, and plenty of Berliners do exactly that. Second, it gets busy at lunch. If you can, come mid-morning or mid-afternoon rather than around 13:00, when office workers and tour groups arrive at once. Berlin's own tourism site has a good overview of the gourmet floor if you want a taste before you go, and my guide to what to buy and eat in Berlin covers the wider city.

One floor up: the Winter Garden

If the food hall is where you graze on your feet, the seventh-floor Winter Garden is where you sit down. It is a rooftop food court under a big glass roof, with a spread of cooking stations and, on a clear day, light pouring in and a view out over the square below.

The glass roof over the top of the store. The seventh-floor Winter Garden is the calmer place to actually eat.

My usual move is simple: browse the sixth floor first, pick up something small, then go one floor up to the Winter Garden to sit with a coffee and a proper view. It turns a shopping stop into an easy half-hour break, which is exactly what you want in the middle of a long Berlin day.

The rest of the store, floor by floor

The lower floors are what you would expect from a luxury department store: beauty and accessories on the ground floor, then fashion climbing up through designer labels, womenswear, menswear, shoes and home. It is a good place to feel the scale of the building, less so to find a bargain.

Because it is easy to wander KaDeWe with no plan and burn an hour without reaching the food hall, I built a small planner for this post. Tell it what you came for and how long you have, and it lays out a realistic floor-by-floor route that ends at the sixth floor.

Getting there: Wittenbergplatz and the west

KaDeWe stands on Tauentzienstraße, and the U-Bahn station Wittenbergplatz (lines U1, U2 and U3) is right outside its door. From Alexanderplatz it is about 15 to 20 minutes on the U2. If you are still getting your head around the network, my explainer on the difference between the U-Bahn and S-Bahn will help you read the map.

Wittenbergplatz, the landmark U-Bahn station right outside KaDeWe, lit up in the evening.

This is firmly the former West Berlin. A few minutes away are the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church with its broken spire and the Kurfürstendamm, the west's big shopping boulevard. So the sensible plan is to treat KaDeWe, the church and the Ku'damm as one western afternoon, rather than trying to squeeze the store in between sights on the historic-centre side of the city.

One timing warning worth repeating: like almost every shop in Germany, KaDeWe is closed on Sundays, and it generally runs Monday to Saturday from about 10:00 to 20:00. Hours can shift a little around public holidays, so it is worth a glance at the official KaDeWe site before a special trip. If Sunday is your only free day, my note on why shops shut on Sundays in Berlin explains what stays open instead.

One money note for visitors from outside the EU: larger purchases can qualify for a VAT refund, which is worth understanding before you spend. I cover the process in my guide to tax-free shopping in Berlin.

A store that survived everything

Part of KaDeWe's pull is that it has been here, on and off, for well over a century. It opened in 1907 and quickly became the smart place to shop in the growing city. During the Second World War the building was gutted; an aircraft crashed into it during the fighting and fire did the rest. For a while there was little more than a shell.

KaDeWe's entrance hall in 1907, the year it opened. The store has been rebuilt and expanded many times since.

The first two floors reopened in 1950 and the store was fully rebuilt by 1956, becoming a symbol of West Berlin's recovery. It has been extended and modernised many times since, and its ownership has changed hands in recent years, but as a shopping trip it has simply carried on. That long, stubborn continuity is a small piece of Berlin's own story, told through a shop rather than a monument.

Is it worth your time?

If you like food markets, grand buildings or a bit of people-watching, yes. Give it an hour, aim straight for the sixth floor, and let the Winter Garden be your sit-down. If food and fashion do not interest you at all, it is a fair thing to skip, and you will not have missed a chunk of the city's history by doing so.

A quick word on where it fits. KaDeWe is out in the west, while my free walking tour starts at Alexanderplatz and explores the historic core of the old East. The two do not overlap, and that is fine. Think of the store as a good west-Berlin half-day, and keep the tour for the day you want to understand how the divided city fit together. If you want to see how the pieces of a Berlin trip connect, my Berlin travel guides can help you build the rest of the plan.

Image credits

• KaDeWe exterior (cover): Jochen Teufel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Sixth-floor food hall (champagne bar): Blorg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Patisserie counter: Katherine Price, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Glass roof over the upper floors: Manfred Brückels, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

• Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn entrance: Reinhold Möller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.