Berlin Chinese Food MapA community-curated guide to eating well in Berlin.
An open, non-profit digital guide to Chinese restaurants in Berlin — built and edited by the people who actually eat there.
Why this exists
What it is
A community-driven, non-profit digital guide to Chinese restaurants in Berlin. No login, no ads, no tracking — just a clean map and a thoughtful taxonomy of cuisines and formats, contributed and edited by people who actually eat at these places.
Where we are
Phase 2 of 4. The MVP is in active development — map, search, filter, restaurant detail and settings are functional; favorites and visit history are next. All four components (app, landing, admin, data pipeline) have working prototypes.
| Phase | Focus | Status | |-------|-------|--------| | 1 — Kick-off | Data handoff, visual direction, schema | Done | | 2 — MVP development | Polished map, detail, filter UX, opening-hours signals | Active | | 3 — Beta | Community beta on WeChat / Xiaohongshu | Upcoming | | 4 — Launch | App Store + Play Store, UGC, curated collections | Upcoming |
Four pieces, one project
- Mobile app — iOS + Android, Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose. Custom map style with cuisine-tagged pill markers; a 22-tag taxonomy across regional and format families; live "open now" status with countdowns.
- Landing page — bilingual (EN / ZH), hand-curated copy. Live at berlinfoodmap.novawerk.io.
- Admin panel — full CRUD for restaurant data, designed for non-technical editors.
- Data pipeline — restaurants live as YAML in the GitHub repo. CI validates the 22-tag taxonomy and syncs to Firestore. Pull requests are the contribution mechanism.
Built with
Kotlin 2.2 · Compose Multiplatform 1.10 · Firebase (anonymous auth + Firestore + Crashlytics) · kmp-maps-compose (Google Maps on Android, MapKit on iOS) · Coil 3 for images.
Privacy-first telemetry — restaurant IDs and route names only, never search queries or coordinates.
How it's going
- Q4 2024Berlin Chinese Food Map idea pitched at a Novawerk open day. First collaborators commit a Saturday afternoon.
- Q1 2025Validation conversations with target users. Scope cut on purpose; the smaller version turns out to be the one people actually want.
- Q2 2025First measurable result: A community-curated guide to eating well in Berlin.. The team writes the playbook so others can replicate.
- Q4 2026Working with a partner organization to extend reach without losing the qualitative care that made it work.
“We didn't want a product launch. We wanted something that would still be here in three years — without us.”
Team & roles
Coordinates direction, runs weekly retros, talks to partners.
Owns the artifact — code, hardware, or the printed thing — depending on the week.
Shows up in person where the work meets the world.
Documentation, retros, community check-ins. Looking for someone.
Get involved
If anything in here resonates — even just one paragraph — that's enough to start a conversation. Lightweight contribution is welcome. So is sitting in on a retro before you decide.
