Brooklyn Beef Club, Mitte

May 31, 2012 6 Comments

I went to Brooklyn Beef Club tonight. Three of my friends have raved about it (all men). One has visited so often he has earned a plaque with his name on it. When I heard, I marveled at the financial feat in that, mains go for around €50. I imagine a big gold plaque as big as my shoe, it turns out it’s more of a plaquette – only slightly bigger than my large toenail. Clever though, the sense of entitlement it gives the client, the impetus to keep returning and rack up enough miles for a gold plaque with their name on it.  (I have a better idea, after a named number of steaks, Brooklyn Beef Club should give you a pair of leather boots or a jacket).

I haven’t checked them all but I am willing to bet good money that all the names on the plaques belong to men. The whole Brooklyn Beef Club is like a bachelor pad. First of all – it’s in the basement, put in a bunk bed and stash some porn under the bed and you’re done. In actual fact, you walk down the stairs and first thing you are confronted with is a humidifier with…cigars. I hate cigars. No one will ever convince me that people earnestly enjoy cigars, rather it’s some sort of manly test, to put something gag inducing and foul in your mouth and patiently chomp and suck on the damn thing for hours on end while making big talk. Big talk as opposed to small talk or even worthy talk – can you imagine smoking a cigar while talking about saving the children in ‘fill in the blank’? No.The menu, like the interior, is made for bachelors. All pretenses for a balanced meal are discarded. We are talking meat. Meat on a big oval white plate with a paper flag impaled in it. You can order sides, potatoes 4 ways: mashed, French fries, rostii, new potatoes. The whole endeavor makes me think of a comedy sketch by Florence Forestri called J’aime pas les garcons (watch the skit on Youtube starting from 3 minutes).When I use the bathroom I notice that there is a Molton Brown liquid hand wash but no hand cream. Because a bachelor, one that eats copious quantities of steak and smokes cigars has probably clocked the fact that fancy restaurants abroad often supply Molton Brown soap but by the time it came to the hand cream, his attention may have wandered. He must have also missed that the dispensers are usually fixed to the wall in some way rather than skidding precariously over the sink grooves designed to house a bar of soap. This is no metro sexual, were he, you might find a ceviche in the starters or a green salad…  These are all a woman’s observations you understand.  The dining room is half full, impressive considering it is a Tuesday evening and Brooklyn Beef Club is on a street utterly devoid of traffic let along foot traffic. There is a table of 6 Swedish men, who speak loudly, order beer to go with their porterhouse steaks (which they order and get well done – even though there is this whole spiel on the front cover of the menu about how they will not serve meat any more cooked than medium-well). The rest of the dining room is made up of couples, the male part of which are positively reverberating with anticipation at the slab of meat they are about to devour.I have the fillet with ‘al dente’ Beelitzer asparagus. First time I’ve had white asparagus cooked that way, not sure I like it. The fillet is good, tender. Under seasoned unfortunately. Nothing like the 55 day aged beef I had at Hedone, in London -  which wasn’t much to look at and didn’t come with a flag but really for meat that good I would consider killing the cow myself. (This from a person who had to get someone else to kill her lobster at Leiths – I know, hypocrite. Maybe I could just run the cow over, or you know give it a good scare and bring on a pain free heart attack?). Read more of this post

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Hokey Pokey, Ice Cream, Prenzlauer Berg

May 27, 2012 9 Comments

 You need to have a compelling reason top open an ice cream shop in Berlin.

I say this because ice cream is the number two most popular thing to eat here after sausages.  You can’t find a cluster of restaurants without an ice cream shop.  Everyone does it, young old, suited, barefoot, they are all licking away.  There is no shame in ordering a spaghetti ice (vanilla ice cream pressed through a potato ricer and topped with a strawberry sauce to mimic tomato sauce and white sprinkles to suggest Parmesan) no matter what your age.Ice cream in Berlin is cheap.  One scoop is usually around €1 (although two years ago, I remember it being €0.60 at the shop across the street).  The bright, crayola box flavours are often wacky; black vanilla, sweet woodruff or the mouth puckering German darling, from everything to face creams to health tonics to….ice cream – sea buckthorn.  At €1 a scoop, I am game to try most of them, cast off my shoes and waggle my toes happily at the simplicity of it all.Whenever I am in Prenzlauerberg for a meal (A Magica tonight) I often skip dessert and go for a decidedly fancier scoop with a lot of American / British flavours like Rocky Road, Banana Peanut Butter and the one for which the shop is named: Hokey Pokey.  But also a lot of superb single flavours – Sicilian pistachio, Indian Mango, Hazelnut and so on. Read more of this post

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Jakobs Höfe, Asparagus & Pumpkin Farm, Beelitz

May 22, 2012 7 Comments

Two years is the length of time t it took me to concede that “White asparagus is not that bad.”  I would go as far as to say: “It is rather good.

“For the last couple of springs, I would encounter mountains and mountains of the stuff, swollen and pale – looking like a sick relative of my beloved green asparagus and turn my nose up at them.  I would scan the corners of the stand, be it at the supermarket or an outdoor market until I would spot a few bundles of the green stuff, usually imported from Greece or Spain.

What made me change my mind?  A plate of asparagus, boiled potatoes and schnitzel at the Ritz.  Ravenous after my Athens flight with EasyJet (why did Stelios call it ‘Easy’ I wonder, is it tongue in cheek? Is it so that when you are ranting like a mad person in your head, about the injustice of paying the same price you would pay a ‘civilized’ carrier, one that doesn’t make you cue ad infinitum, the word ‘easy’ can continually bait you?  Yes, I would fly another carrier, any other carrier, except wouldn’t you know it ‘easy’ jet is the only one that continues to fly to Athens from Berlin.)

A meal at the Ritz will make most things palatable, they even gussy up the lemon half with a bit of yellow gauze (to keep the pips from dropping out when you squeeze the lemon, since you ask).  €30 is what that plate of food cost.  ’Beelitz’ asparagus is what it said on the menu.  Beelitz and its asparagus seems to be to Berliners what Yorkshire and its rhubarb seems to be to Londoners.  I have journeyed to Yorkshire and strained my ears with the rest of the rhubarb tourists listening for the rhubarb squeak.  It seemed reasonable to me that I should travel to Beelitz and see white asparagus in  the stalk.After spending some time poking around on www.beelitzerspargel.de, I settled on Jacobs Hof.  I bundled hubby and daughter off into the car and 45 minutes later we were staring at a 2 story inflatable asparagus spear with a big grin pasted on its face. We made our way to the restaurant and were asked if we had a reservation – ‘Eh…? To eat asparagus in the middle of nowhere?” I thought?  But the lady wasn’t off her rocker, it was buzzing in there.  True most people were over 70 but they were having a grand old-time.  They found us a table.  We ordered asparagus with potatoes and ham (€12.50) with hollandaise sauce.  The asparagus was dreamy, the potatoes were incredibly flavourful and the ham was, good sliced ham.  The hollandaise sauce was from a carton, I think it almost always is here, except for at the Ritz but even there it was more like a mayonnaise than an hollandaise.  To be honest, even that didn’t sully the asparagus.  It was good.  So good that I bought some and made them with homemade hollandaise a few days later.  Read more of this post

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HBC., Mitte

May 18, 2012 Leave a comment

 HBC. is the most complete embodiment of Berlin I’ve encountered in a restaurant, in my two years of eating out in the city.

To begin with, the train stop is Alexanderplatz- a cluster of mismatched buildings which look like they were put there by a child playing building blocks. Someone who thinks it’s perfectly normal that Barbie, Minnie Mouse and a couple of Lego figures should all be having tea together.  

If you walk down from the station to Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, you have to walk by the ugly shop fronts exhibiting their wares, cringe inducing shoes for €10 or worse, a 3D Buddha who follows you as you walk by. (now who is the snob?)If Sylee hadn’t told me HBC. was up the stairs, I would have walked right past it.  Many times.  Another Berlin characteristic, while restaurants the world over shout from the highest mountain about their presence, quite a few restaurants in Berlin are happy to crouch on a bar stool, legs crossed, arms folded and let you figure it out.

Then there is the space itself.  Enormous.  And the number of bodies contained within, the merest fraction of what they should be to make the rent of such a large place, with views of St. Mary’s Church and the top-heavy Fernsehturm,  viable.As for “What does it say it does on the box?”.  Well what doesn’t it do? ‘A combination art gallery, lounge, party space and art-world cantina’ (excerpt from the New York Times Review, full article here).  In a city where central commercial space is still plentiful and cheap (unlike apartments which, I’ve been looking to buy, have become freakin’ expensive considering the low rents you get) you often get this mixed use of space.The waiter can not be readily identified as such, except that at some point he struts over, hips thrust forward and carves out a dramatic arc through the air with the menus as he hands them over to us.  His arms are (of course) tattooed, an interesting medley the most striking of which is a series of faded burgundy rings, like bracelets or uniform zebra stripes that run up his forearm.

The dining room is eclectic.  Plastic chairs I remember from my art classes coupled with starched heavy tablecloths and glasses so polished, they look like they just came out of their box. Heavy cement lamps, suspended over most tables  and emanating a warm orange light.  Not forgetting the large windows with a view onto St. Mary’s Church.

The menu is only €33 for 3 courses and a side.  There are some kooky things to be found on it, a rhubarb risotto for instance.  The exotic sounding glazed duck with kumquat and liquorice onion which on the plate is a perfectly tame pan-fried duck breast, a neat huddle of kumquats off to one side and an onion not quite tender enough for me to eat with no discernible taste of liquorice. Read more of this post

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Da Baffi, Italian Food, Wedding

May 13, 2012 10 Comments

There is something about the combination of the gold lettering and the white pleated curtains in the window of Da Baffi that makes me think of an old-fashioned box of chocolates.  The kind where once you took the carton lid off, you had to peel a sticker off the seam of the thick pearlified paper.  Each chocolate would be housed in its own ruffled white paper.  Picking one up would create a pleasing commotion of paper wrappers rubbing against each other.We are seated in the back room.  Instead of table cloths, there are tea towels that have been sewn together to make perpendicular runners.  The adornment of the room comes from the squiggly white flourescent light on one wall and the fat bodied vases on each table.  The flowers, not the €1.99 bargain tulips you can get at any Lidl, but a composition of spiky leaves and small flowers you might expect to find somewhere in the mediterranean.There is something of the Lavanderia Vecchia in that back room, the colour scheme, the neon – not as extreme nor as contrived but if the two restaurants were people and I found out that Da Baffi was the son of a cousin twice removed, it wouldn’t surprise me.  I don’t think there is any relation of course.  In fact, Lavanderia employs a young man from Munich (?) as their chef whereas walk by the kitchen at Da Baffi and amid the clinks and the clangs you will here the long ‘a’s’ of Italian.The menu, excuse me as I make the cross (I am not religious you understand but some things just warrant excessive gratefulness), is printed on a narrow piece of paper.  It lists a variety of carpaccios, a caponata, a burrata from Puglia, as starters. Followed by a choice of 3 pastas, tagliolini with truffle for example, or a risotto with gorgonzola, pear and nuts.  No Bolognese although the kitchen kindly makes a small plate of farfalle with tomato sauce for Layla.  Read more of this post

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Maialino, Focaccia, Mitte

May 8, 2012 3 Comments

On the right side of the cavernous Bar Celona restaurant on Hannoversche str is the tiny focaccia deli run by a brother and sister team from Italy.  Underneath a silhouette of a pig, ears askew, ‘maialino’ is scrawled in lowercase childlike handwriting.  On either side of the entrance the walls have been painted black and (I only realize this later) the menu is listed.   Through the window, a communal table painted in white and hanging above – the whimsical chandelier by Ingo Maurer, love letters discarded and ‘maialino’ business cards suspended in their place. Because the design is so friendly and informal, I expect to like it.  Much like a first day of school when you scan the room and find someone you like the look of and think “Oh, I want to be friends with her.”I do like it.  The menu is simplicity itself.  It’s all about what you can get between two slices of fluffy focaccia.  Lardo di Colonnata in the ‘toscana’.  Mortadella and caciotta cheese in the ‘emiliana’.  Don’t expect a sandwich bloated with filling, rather, thin slivers of your filling of choice set off the star of the show – the focaccia.  Which they buy in from an Italian baker from Naples (but who bakes in Berlin). There is a tiny daily menu of soups – yesterday I tried the white asparagus.  A large serving, somewhat on the thin side but at least without the dreaded greasy twang of a knorr stock cube .  My friend had a Quiche, more like a pie.  I do find the focaccia to be the best thing on the menu, especially when combined with some salad leaves, dressed with a salty balsamic dressing and wearing a beret of sliced tomatoes. Read more of this post

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Pbox Eatery, Kifissia-Athens, Greece

May 4, 2012 2 Comments

In Athens, I regress back to the lazy teenager I once was. Even though it’s May, it’s hot enough that my brain begins to tick into action after the sun has set. Even then, there is only a skeleton crew operating.  It turns out that interminable grey days are boon to productivity rather than the bane of it.

Yesterday, the radiant sunshine was accompanied by a cool breeze.  This coupled with sucking down two ice laden frappés (turns out that frappés are not a quirky habit but an operational necessity in these parts)  in quick succession made me decide to go down to Kifissia and try out PBox.  A diminutive eatery I had earmarked on my last trip but missed when I found them closed for lunch.I suffer from mild bouts of spring fever.  Among the squat bitter orange trees that line the narrow pavements in my mother’s neighborhood of Holargos it’s not too bad but once I get to Kifissia all villas, nestled in verdant gardens, my sneezing takes on the frequency of machine gun fire.  Entirely worth it, I love Kifissia and its lack of high rises tottering on pillars.  You would never see one neighbor talking to another in a wife beater ribbed white undershirt, hairy nipple poking out through the saggy arm holes in Kifissia (something you will see frequently in most neighborhoods).No, in Kifissia, everyone is elegant, coiffed and sunglassed.  The older ladies wear large chunky jewelery perhaps to complement their large hair (I don’t think they every truly said goodbye to Dynasty).  Every female over 10 years old has a flawless mani-pedi with that telltale sheen that speaks of a trip to the salon as opposed to a home job.  10% of the stores are for rent here as opposed to the rest of Athens where I would put the number closer to 60%.

There are lots of ladies (and gentlemen) lunching and plenty of places catering to them.

P Box is an all day eatery that snags a lot of them.  The menu runs along two different veins, Greek or Japanese / Asian / International.   The Greek part is simple fare, cheeses and meats from around Greece, grilled halloumi from Crete for instance and sausage from Lefkada.  And then a faffy aspirational menu, carpaccio, blue cheese tart, something 3 tables away with way too much truffle oil gaining in pungency as the heat got to it- lots of green salads with things on top, say chicken or tuna.  I’m lamenting this lack of conviction to going with local when it occurs to me that most of the tables have ordered the aspirational stuff with a favouring for the large bowls of frilly salad leaves.Criminal really!  The tomatoes here are so fleshy and full of juice that I cut them straight into the bowl I will be eating them from.  From the two tomatoes I cut up for lunch today, I had over a cup of tomato juice to which I added 1/4 cup of organic olive oil from a greek monastery and a shower of oregano that the 80-year-old mother of a friend of my mothers picked herself in Chania.  Such purity and strength of flavour and there they go eating a frilly leaves with overly sweet Dijon mustard dressing. Read more of this post

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Centro Italia, Cash & Carry, Prenzlauerberg

April 22, 2012 2 Comments

As I was getting out of my car in the parking lot in front of Centro Italia, a beat up old Alfa Romeo came careening down the hill – gravel flying off to one side.  He switched off the engine before he had parked, crunching into a spot and pulling the hand brake loudly. He slammed the door so hard the windshield rattled.  He had a tan, he wore his hair longer than people normally do in Berlin and walked to the entrance of the cash and carry in long quick strides.

I can understand his urgency, it was ten to four and Centro Italia closes at 4 on saturday.Finding good Italian food is a challenge in most cities, not just Berlin (in London I recommend the River Café, Locanda Locatelli for a sophisticated  glamorous approach, or Zucca).  Sure you can find mozzarella with tomatoes and basil, pizza, limp pasta with arrabiata sauce or a grainy Bolognese.  But that’s like pretending those refrigerated plastic trays of sushi have any relation to the real deal.  Italian food is so varied and nuanced, you only have to look at the number of grape varieties they have – thousands, to understand why an authentic Italian meal proves so elusive. Read more of this post

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Petit Fleury, Café, Mitte

April 16, 2012 2 Comments

I’ve never been to papa Fleury or the original CafeFleury (no website so have a look on the HG2 write up here) as it’s known across the street. The blue awning caught my eye as I trundled past it on the M1. Along with the menu listing, white on black, in a cluster of different fonts.  And the outdoor seating, provided in the form of stacked ChariTea crates.  Good looking place, it has to be to open on this street where rent must cost a pretty penny.I observed all this and more, jotted the name down and then as usual forgot all about it.  Until a short time later both Cee Cee and Sugarhigh included it in their newsletter in the same week.

Lest I forget again, I quickly made plans for lunch with my girlfriend.  When we arrived,  someone had already scratched some nonsense into the thick pane of glass.  I felt for the owners.  I know how hard it is to open up a business and get it going well enough that you can stick your neck out and open a second place only to have someone deface it within weeks…The spunky awning outside is echoed with a wall of the same colour inside.  A bar is lined with framed photographs of  movie stars (Paul Newman, Marlon Brando type movie stars).  There is an open fridge where you can help yourself to yogurts, quarks, drinks and the likes.  Another serviced vitrine with some cakes and sandwiches.  Or you can order from a small menu.  The kitchen at the back is visible through a large open pass – always a sign of confidence that the cooks have nothing to hide.

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Annie Rigg’s Chocolate Prune Cake

April 10, 2012 12 Comments

Prunes.

Thumbs up?

Thumbs down?For me? Definitely thumbs up.  No question. No contest.  Sometimes I prefer them to the real deal (plums).  (Without me being to indelicate or unladylike, let me underline that my love of prunes has to do with flavour and texture only and not an other activities they may set in motion.)There are prunes and there are prunes though.  They have to have their stone intact and come from Agen.  Even then, not all packaging, handling is equal.  Recently, I found some extraordinary prunes at Galeries Lafayette, I can’t be sure but I think they were from Thorem.  Today I found a jar of St. Dalfour giant french prunes at Karstadt on the Kudamm.  I ate half the contents on the way home.For this prune cake, I use stoned organic prunes reasoning that they would be simmered in alcohol, pulverized and have ground almonds and 70% chocolate as bedmates.  It’s a recipe by Annie Rigg’s which I found in the Easter edition of BBC Good Food magazine.  Despite the unflattering picture (seriously, take a look at the link, did they photograph it on a paper plate?) the ingredient list  and method moved me to bake.  Rigg’s suggests whipping up the 2 eggs and 2 of the yolks with the sugar, folding everything in and then whipping up the remaining two egg whites and folding those in at the end to keep it light.   Read more of this post

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