Lavanderia Vecchia

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Laundry Turned Trattoria

The name says it all. When the commercial laundry that once occupied a Neukölln courtyard building on Flughafenstrasse moved out, Renate — a born-and-bred Neukölln local — and Andreas — a self-described Italian at heart since childhood — saw something other than an empty industrial space. They saw a trattoria. The restaurant opened in April 2010, and what began as a project among friends quickly gained a professional anchor when chef Benni Bräuniger joined just before the doors opened.

Renate shaped the raw industrial rooms into something that feels like stepping onto an Italian street: laundry lines strung across the dining room, original foot-pedal washbasins, a proper Italian bar, and a smokers' lounge fitted with aircraft seats and a record player. A television runs in the corner all day, as it would in any self-respecting trattoria back home. The open show kitchen sits at the centre of it all, where the Italian kitchen team works in full view of the room.

The People Behind the Kitchen

After the founding chef moved on at the end of 2015, Andrea Angelino — recruited from a restaurant on the beach at Tarquinia in the Lazio region that Andreas had first visited thirty years earlier — took over the kitchen. When Andrea later relocated to Spain, his protégé Iacopo, also from the area around Spoleto, stepped into the role. Today, the family dimension extends further: daughter Elena has joined the management, ensuring continuity for the years ahead.

Lunch, Dinner, and the Ritual at the Bar

Midday brings a rotating Italian lunch menu — antipasti, house-made pasta, and seasonal secondi — available Wednesday through Friday. Evenings are a different register entirely. The fixed five-course dinner, served Wednesday through Sunday, draws directly on the tradition of a Sunday family feast in Lazio: multiple antipasti, a primo, secondo, and dessert, all included in a single price that also covers wine from a Demeter-certified producer in the Abruzzo, water, and — in a detail that captures the spirit of the place — an espresso and digestivo taken standing at the bar. The house olive oil comes from personal friends in the Sabina region of Lazio.

The Italian kitchen also accommodates vegetarians, with a parallel dinner menu available on request, and the lunch offer has long included a discount for Berlinpass holders — a deliberate, conviction-driven policy the founders describe simply as "giving back being part of it."

Recognised by Gambero Rosso, Italy's most authoritative Italian food guide, Lavanderia Vecchia has over more than a decade earned its place among the guides and publications — from Feinschmecker to Lonely Planet — that take Italian cooking seriously wherever it happens in the world.