The luxurious £57 train linking Paris and Berlin for the first time – with armchairs and beer on tap
I’m riding the very first daytime direct train between Paris and Berlin. My Deutsche Bahn ICE train, Germany’s finest, is a luxurious rocketship that touches Formula One speeds. There’s veal goulash in the dining car. Erdinger beer can be served at your seat. Best of all, the brand new route brings together Europe’s biggest capitals in an effortless twin centre escape.
My own tale of two cities began the previous day on the lunchtime Eurostar from London to Paris. Eurostar deposits passengers at Gare du Nord into a Parisian mise-en-scène. I prefer this northern neighbourhood to the Champs-Élysées, the Parisian equivalent of Trafalgar Square, with its pigeons and Americans. This Haussmann-handsome, garret-crowned quartier is an un-Disneyfied district of boulangeries, cigarettes and £6 plats du jour. Peugeots struggle to squeeze where bikes rush through like mercury. Here kids, Carrefour deliveries and La Poste all travel à vélo.
With time to spare before check-in, I stroll up Canal Saint-Martin, the district’s watery artery. The café-lined canal was built by the only Frenchman bullish enough to rip through northern Paris (Napoleon), using tax receipts from the nation’s greatest export (wine). Icons of insurgence are commonplace. A boycott McDo sticker. A pick-up-dog-poo sign graffitied to look like a man picking up a giant baguette. Yet strollers look well-heeled, well-groomed and only work for, well, 35 hours per week. It’s a revolution I want to join.
My Paris hotel is also new. The lobby of Bloom House, a five-minute walk from both Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est (the Berlin train’s departure) looks like Salvador Dali’s conservatory. Spanish moss drips from the ceiling to tickle contemporary objets d’art. Although there’s a basement swimming pool, its skylight open to the stars, I can’t resist the lure of the nearby Le Sacré-Coeur Basilica, a shimmering Catholic spaceship that proves all too enticing a sight from my sixth-floor balcony.
By day the church built on Montmartre – the hill of martyrs – is one of Paris’s most visited attractions thanks to its Insta-magical skyline views. After sunset the basilica is atmospherically empty. Just me, a 30ft-high gilded Jesus and a few faithful kneeling to prayer. I light a €2 candle, and thank Him that I haven’t spent a centime on Paris transport thus far. (Indeed I pay for no airport shuttles, metros or taxis during my 48-hour train escape.) At 9pm I’m bonged by France’s biggest bell, which calls me back down to Gare du Nord for dinner.
Brasserie Terminus Nord is another Paris institution. The restaurant contains a perfectly circular bar where besuited staff pour every boisson in the French Republique. I half expect Winston Churchill to storm off Le Train Bleu and chase a crème de menthe with a flute of Champagne. The brasserie’s menu has barely changed since its inception in 1925. I pair half a Normandy crab and a sole meunière with an icy pichet of Chablis. Terminus Nord’s only nod to modernity is a digital departures board. It allows diners to devour the €29/£24 menu prix fixe while tracking trains to Amsterdam and Dunkirk.
The following morning I stock up on snacks for my Berlin train at Marché Saint-Quentin, a few minutes from Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. The indoor market is an unrefined French foodie fantasy. Imagine dangling hams, oyster shuckers, Marrakech pastries, Vietnamese fryers and a plat du jour kiosk packaging lunches for WFHers to eat al desko. I’m ready to board.
My 9.55am train to Berlin looks like an ice-white lighting bolt. The first class armchair seats (£57 for mine) recline. There’s a footrest below and reading light above. We pounce out of a wintry Paris. Picture windows screen a seasonal panorama: frosty vineyards, deer in the mist and roofs built steep to shrug off snow. A few minutes inside Germany, there’s sulphurous puff above Baden-Baden, a spa town so fancy they named it twice.
The ICE train gallops through Germany. In first class I can feel the electric buzz of the 10,000 horsepower engine a few paces away. Yet inside each carriage, an armchair calm reigns. Older women work on sudoku. Commuters put in eight-hour days. Carbon neutral travellers gaze at a green sheen of birch forest and beetroot fields, all at around 200mph.
At noon I occupy a red booth in the dining car. It’s French vs German as I unpack my saucisson and macarons alongside a side order of bratwurst, sandwiched between two buns. Sure beats a British Airways sandwich. The high speed train slows slightly for cities – Karlsruhe, Frankfurt – where we peek into windows like a voyeur on speed. I spot Christmas wrapping, children napping and parents airing dirty linen. Before our electric Prometheus powers through the quickening night towards Berlin.
The directions from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof train station to Germany’s fanciest hotel are impossibly grand. Turn left at the Reichstag, go under the Brandenburg Gate, and can’t miss the Kempinski Hotel Adlon.
The Adlon originated in 1907 when Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s reckless grandson, needed a capital guesthouse with hot water and in-room telephones to impress the foreign bigwigs who railroaded in. Today the concierge can reserve tickets for the new Paris-Berlin train. Better still, hotel staff can pack picnics for early train departures back towards London. Breakfast boxes may feature Berlin liver sausage and chocolate bars shaped like the Brandenburg Gate.
But I have a town to paint red. The gargantuan dining room at new restaurant Luna d’Oro looks like a scene from Cabaret. Yet with a spinning disco ball, staff with Mad Max hairdos and shocking pink urinals in the bathrooms. It’s Berlin Bacchanalia. The cuisine reinterprets capital classics using local ingredients: deep fried Spree pickles, traditional tartare meat squished into a hedgehog shape with red onion slices as spikes. A secret door leads upstairs to a bopping 1920s ballroom – Clärchens Ballhaus. I’m invited to salsa, swing or tango. But I have one last address to check.
Cocktail bar The Gibson just moved from London to Berlin. It’s a speakeasy straight out of a Christopher Isherwood novel, where drink combos are Willy Wonka meets Keith Richards. Statuesque servers shake drinks of beguiling complexity. All That Buzz contains gin infused with Japanese shiso herbs, laced with citrus grass and a Sicilian bergamot liqueur. It comes with an electric daisy (the Brazilian “toothache plant”) that numbs, teases and tickles gums like a demon dentist.
I wake up on day three with a Franco-German hangover: Champagne, Armagnac, schnapps. Fortunately the ultimate detox cure sits alongside Hauptbahnhof train station. Vabali is an Asian-themed wellness oasis. And in liberal Berlin, patrons are completely nude. I wallow in scalding pools, fragrant baths and enjoy a camomile infusion ceremony with 30 naked Germans in one of the ten saunas. The experience soothes my whistle-stop two-night tour. I emerge more electrified than the high speed train.
Essentials
Berlin’s best new bargain hotel is Locke at East Side Gallery (doubles from £93), where spacious self-contained studios overlook the River Spree or Berlin skyline. The hotel features a riverside roof terrace and a spin-your-own-vinyl record collection room. Eurostar tickets to Paris start from £39, or £275 in Premier.
This high-speed link was also upgraded last month. Premier class has a new complementary menu created by a two-star Michelin chef, served by staff pinched from Paris’s best restaurants. Deutsche Bahn operates the daily Paris-Berlin service from £49, or £57 in first class. Vabali entrance costs from £24.
Tristan Rutherford travelled as a guest of VisitBerlin, Kempinski Hotel Adlon (doubles from £266) and Bloom House Hotel (doubles from £127).
