Inside the Eccentric Japanese-Inspired Studio of a Beloved Berlin Artist
Despite recent waves of gentrification, Berlin is still a city full of artists. While some (including Wolfgang Tillmans and Katharina Grosse) are world-renowned, it's another cast of characters who keep the city strange and unpredictable. There's the avant-garde choreographer Florentina Holzinger, for example, known for staging operas with plentiful fake blood, and the 82-year-old fashion knitwear designer Claudia Skoda, who's often seen out at nightclubs. Then there's the artist Oliver Prestele, 52, who can be spotted around town wearing fluffy dog-hair hats and giant wooden clogs. Long obsessed with all aspects of traditional Japanese culture, he is one of the city's most passionate ceramists, a co-owner of some of its most successful Japanese restaurants and a gatherer of people. At the weekly Sunday dinners he hosts at his atelier, one might meet any number of creative Berliners, from the Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo to the German Japanese classical violinist and artist Ayumi Paul.
Located in the Uferhallen, a canal-side complex of artists' studios in the developing Wedding neighborhood, Prestele's 2,000-square-foot, two-floor space contains a glassed-in room that he uses as a ceramics studio and a large open kitchen and fermentation laboratory lined with plants and pottery. Last year, he made soba noodles there every Sunday until he was satisfied that they were perfect. On the second-floor mezzanine, he's installed an irori, a traditional Japanese sunken hearth, where he sometimes cooks nabe, Japanese hot pot.
Born and raised in a small village in Bavaria, Prestele moved to Berlin in the 1990s to study product design at the Berlin University of the Arts, where one of his professors, a Japanese sculptor, instilled in him a fascination with Japan. After leaving university, he traveled to that country as often as he could, obsessively teaching himself to cook ramen. In 2001, he built a wooden ramen cart and began serving noodles in different spaces around Berlin's then-gritty Mitte neighborhood. 'Everything about it was illegal,' he says. He soon began catering for photographers including Peter Lindbergh, and in the mid 2000s, Prestele partnered with the Vietnamese restaurateur Ngu Quang Huy to open the ramen restaurant Cocolo, which now has two locations.
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