Unlike the country singer Lynn Anderson, Chef Anja Voth can promise you a rose garden. The patio tables at Anja’s, her new cafe, are nestled alongside beds of pink and red roses. Anja’s is a restart for Voth and her husband, Kai Flache. After 13 years, they closed their first restaurant earlier this year in March. At Gaumenkitzel on San Pablo Avenue, Voth served German dishes such as beef goulash on spaetzle, pork schnitzel and pan-fried rainbow trout.
Shortly after her temporary retirement, Voth felt herself falling into a “deep hole.” She simply wasn’t ready to quit the business. Gaumenkitzel closed, in part, due to employee attrition. “Since the pandemic, we lost more than 90% of our team and we were never able to build it up again,” she said. The stress resulting from an increased workload took its toll on the chef and the few remaining members of her staff.
Voth then explored a few options, including working at someone else’s restaurant, before deciding that a smaller place of her own felt like the best way forward. After Garden Variety closed on University Avenue, the landlord reached out to Voth to see if she was interested in moving in. The chef devised a menu that would suit the smaller kitchen. And, at the end of August, Voth opened her eponymously named cafe.
During its soft-opening face, the cafe will be only open for breakfast and lunch. The new menu features lighter fare than that served at Gaumenkitzel. The schnitzel is gone as are the more complex German dishes that require big pots for braising. Instead, Voth is focusing on soups, salads and fish. “I’m ordering the same organic, sustainable local food with all of my previous suppliers,” she said. Some of the breakfast items and baked goods, though, will be familiar to her regular customers.
While she doesn’t have enough room to make her signature Black Forest cake, Voth is making sheet cakes with a yeasted dough. When I dropped by to eat breakfast amongst the sun-dappled roses, two freshly made sheet cakes stood on display—poppyseed with a sugary glaze, and a second made with apples. The chef is waiting for the fall harvest of Italian plums to make a third kind of sheet cake that, she said, “every German bakery has.” Voth’s Gugelhopf cake looks like a traditional bundt and is made with almond extract and chocolate chips. “That’s something from my childhood,” she said. “When I was a little girl, it was one of the first cakes I baked.”
Since she’s moved into Anja’s and started operations again, Voth said she already feels at home there even if the kitchen space is more challenging than the one at Gaumenkitzel. “If you have a really tight space and you work with two or three people together, then you want to utilize every little inch,” she said. “It’s more of a puzzle, which I like.”
For breakfast I ordered the “creamy porridge of oats” ($9) topped with brown sugar, walnuts and macerated peaches and strawberries. The dish could also be described as a fluffy comforting bowl of oats. I especially like it when restaurants toss in a cornucopia of different ingredients on top of morning oats to disguise the fact that you’re eating malleable, but bland, grains.
One of Voth’s savory breakfast items is a Kartoffelauflauf. In Germany, the chef explained, this potato-and-egg dish is normally served as a casserole. With the kitchen’s limitations, Voth makes them muffin-sized ($5) and serves them with a side salad of beets ($10) or smoked salmon ($13.50). Paired with a bowl of porridge and a slice of poppyseed cake—it’s essentially a coffee cake—one portion of an egg-and-golden-potato muffin filled me up.
Voth also makes muffins with her Gugelhopf recipe. Her new customer base includes people who want to stop and smell the roses, but the location is also convenient for customers on the go. “That’s why I make the muffin versions,” she said. Later this year, Voth plans to serve dinner a couple of nights a week. For now diners can stop by for more substantial lunches, featuring poached rockfish, cannellini bean soup and a fisherwoman’s bowl of macaroni.
Anja’s; Tue to Sat, 8:30am to 3pm; 1966 University Ave., Berkeley. 510.647.5016. yelp.com/biz/anja-s-berkeley
