Galeria Kaufhof, Food Hall, Mitte

February 22, 2012 11 Comments

I remember walking into Restaurant Gordon Ramsay – Royal Hospital Road, it was one of those days when the blustery wind was making the rain come at me in horizontal sheets, from unpredictable angles.  I was dripping self-consciously on the entrance carpet, my previously styled hair beginning to dry and stick out in a wiry sunburst.  Somehow, as I tried to wrestle my battered umbrella into submission, it rebelled and burst open, drenching the Maitre ‘D and making him look like he too has suffered the same wet ordeal from Sloane square tube station to the 3 Michelin starred restaurant.

“Oh! I am so sorry!” I exclaimed, ready to turn on my heel and go out into the rain rather than face any more embarrassment.

“Ah – so fresh!” he smiled “I was in need of a bit of refreshment.” He eased me out of my coat and escorted me to my table.

He and his brigade continued to serve me as if I were a guest of utmost importance or at least one with impressive spending power (In reality, I am the worst kind of guest in Michelin starred restaurants because I only order 1 bottle of water and 1 glass of wine, I’m not really worth the space I take).It was one of my best multi Michelin starred experiences in London, followed closely by The Square, and Tom Aikens. (A notable albeit surprising service dud was The Fat Duck in Bray).  That was 2005, 7 years ago and I still remember it, although I no longer remember what I ate.  (That’s why, I always keep the menu)

I bring all this up as a way of underlining how memorable human interaction is, can be.  After countless shopping experiences at Galeria where service so bad it borders on comic and should be accompanied by canned laughter I have placed them at the farthest end of the scale from that wet afternoon on Hospital Road. Take the fish counter.  I have had 3 experiences.  First time, they tried to sell me the shriveled up old piece when there was a fresh, plump one right next to it.  Another time, the tail end.  Still another, I asked for two pieces and got one nice portion and another that was almost double in size.  That’s like being given a right shoe in a size 37 and a left shoe in a 38 and when you complain being told to get a grip and just shove some toilet paper in at the toe.  More or less the reaction of the fishwife.  I insisted nonetheless, she grumbled something, probably a hex of some sort as I have been struck down by the most monstrous of colds.Thinking I would be safe if I stayed within the self-service boundary of Galeria, I went to pick up some ground coffee.  My path was impeded by a large woman with a trolley re-stocking the shelves.  ”Excuse me.” I smiled “Would it be alright if I grabbed that coffee?”  ”When I’ve finished.” she replied gruffly.  I stood there, 86, 85, 84…2, 1 until the last tin was on the shelf.  Ok, she moved her trolley out of her way without so much as a nod of acknowledgment in my direction.  Goings on so preposterous, I am physically rooted to the spot with incredulity. Read more of this post

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La Bonne Franquette, Brasserie (Lunch), Mitte

February 18, 2012 6 Comments

Did you know that you can have a two course lunch at La Bonne Franquette for €10?  And that includes a drink?  Somehow I missed that when I was looking at their website.  When the waiter angled the chalk menu towards my table I did one of those cartoon moves where you hear a trumpet ***HONK***, your feet come off the floor, your eyebrows lift into the aether and your eyeballs multiply away from your face getting bigger the farther away they are.  (Well in my head. A lot goes on in-my-head.)

If you want the flank steak (skirt steak), and you do want the flank steak, it’s a supplementary €3.  This cut has a lot of chew to it, with visible fibers, which means you order it medium rare otherwise you will be masticating for rather a long time.  To compensate for the jaw work out it packs a lot of flavour.  It’s hard not to eat every last one of those skin on fries (you may ask why one would even contemplate such a thing – welcome to a woman’s mind, it’s all about abstinence, too much of a good thing is very very bad).

That wasn’t my dish by the way, it was my friend’s.  Mine was an aubergine cous cous dish.  When I went to University in Paris, my friend Giulia and I would often lunch at a Moroccan place on Rue de Grenelle.  I pictured a vegetarian tagine of chickpeas and aubergine and a steaming bowl of cous cous like I used to eat there.  The nostalgic water works in my mouth abruptly dried up when I got my order.  A shallow filled eggplant skin, where the flesh had gone off to, I don’t know.  The cous cous filling bland and dry, the handsome broccoli florets unsalted and cold and the accompanying salad a repeat of my appetizer (beetroot and apple with balsamic mustard dressing).  Hope manifested itself in a miniature bowl of sauce.  Something salty perhaps? Or a tangy  yogurt with a breathe of garlic to liven everything up?  Alas, no it was cream (huh?) with cinnamon (whaaaaa….?) and it got left behind.

I blame myself really.  (That’s another thing women readily do)  It’s a brasserie and I should have stuck to what brasseries do best instead of going off on some Don Quixoten/esque (?) quest to find a tagine as good as the one I used to eat on Rue de Grenelle when I was 18 and you could have gathered up all my culinary expertise, dumped it into a chickpea skin and still had space to spare.  Read more of this post

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Carmens Restaurant, Regional Food, Eichwalde

February 14, 2012 4 Comments

Where I live in Mitte, it’s all concrete, grit and black snow, I was hankering after something different – probably spring but I was willing to settle for a foray outside Berlin.  And not Potsdam.  (Heaven preserve us from overly sweet hot chocolate and towering ‘kuchen’).  My husband, having grown up in a suburb, within a suburb, within a suburb, in other words 3 houses clustered together or where the fox says goodnight to the owl – has an acute fear of anywhere without a Starbucks.  Not that he has a thing for Starbucks per se but you need a certain population density for a crowned green mermaid to take over a coffee shop near you.  I on the other hand grew up in Athens, up in the mountains.  From the age of 5, I could walk out by myself and get a Snickers bar from the kiosk to sustain me on my 5 minute amble to the video store.  So I want a garden and he dreams of living in a hotel, where the ketchup and shampoo is miniature and sealed.Predictably, I started cooing over all the tree houses I saw in the large gardens.  ”Imagine how much fun children must have out here!’  He got tense and started driving faster, presumably reasoning that the faster we got there, the faster we could get out again.  ”And how did you hear about this place again?” he asked.  ”Someone I follow tweeted me the recommendation.”  ”You and twitter.” he mumbled.  (See “I Tweet, Therefore I Am” in the NY Times)Carmens is about an hour outside Berlin.  It is, as my husband’s rigid body language testified, very rural.  A former butcher’s is now home to a restaurant specializing in regional cuisine.  The Michelin guide lists it under best value and charming restaurants.  We walk in, Hrabi carrying Layla, Layla carrying an armful worth of Disney characters, a Muller yogurt and a plastic spoon. A roomful of older people, stop eating, cutlery poised mid-air and breathe a sigh of relief when we are discretely shown a table on its own by the window.  Not a place that welcomes children then.  The feeling I got is that Carmens is a place that families (with older children) go for special occasions and where they eat food like they used to find in an interior that would go well with the outfits in Debbie Gibson’s 1989 video Electric Youth.  Remember that time? The chairs are metal and painted in matt black paint, circular metal cabinets with glass shelves hold rows of glasses.  The carpet is blue, the tablecloths are yellow.  It has been a long time since the place was updated.

The food was similarly nostalgic.  The components of the salad that came with my fish were all peeled.  Everything; green peppers, tomatoes (deseeded), cucumbers (deseeded).  The fish had been wrapped in an intricate confetti of potato and fried in butter.  Fried in butter was the theme of the our main courses, it was wafting out every time the kitchen door swung open.    Hrabi’s schnitzel had been similarly bathed in butter, the potato salad came with the superfluous addition of mushrooms.   Read more of this post

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Phoebe in Berlin, Chinese Supper Club, Friedrichshain

February 6, 2012 6 Comments

Expectations are a funny thing. Honed over years of living to have the smallest margin of error possible. People rely on preconceived expectations to a greater or smaller degree, depending. I rely on them a lot, have become adept at gathering information and vetting the personalities who may have offered me the tip to come up with as accurate a picture as possible.Consequently, I am not often surprised. Or let’s put it this way, I am rarely positively surprised.

Caroline and Tobias of the Thyme Supper Club recommended Phoebe in Berlin’s. Their words “It’s something different. She’s a professional chef, not an enthusiastic amateur. She does French food and Chinese. The Chinese is special, not like any Chinese food we’ve ever eaten before.”It wasn’t.

It took a couple of months, a flurry of emails and one cancellation for enough people to be interested to make the Chinese themed evening viable. Good things are worth waiting for and the shifting date meant that I didn’t go into overdrive imagining what it must be like. In fact when the email finally came: “Hallo! Happy to see you! Tomorrow night 7:30” it caught me totally off guard, I didn’t even know if my husband was in town to watch Layla.We were asked to leave our boots at the door and invited to help ourselves to a pair of slippers from an overflowing wicker basket (love that, stealing that! I too make people take off their shoes but I don’t provide any slippers).Phoebe is from Taiwan, where she ran a successful French restaurant (Louis XIV) for over 10 years. Her apartment is large, bright and Ikea free with plenty of unfamiliar decorative pieces that give the place an Asian flair. Not Asian like you or I could achieve, trawling the shops around here, more like bits and pieces you might find in a Mandarin Oriental in Taiwan.Phoebe struts decisively in knee-high black boots with waist length hair and an awesome air of authority. I have an odd thought, primal in nature: ‘if we went into battle, I would follow Phoebe’ – which is weird really, because normally I would expect people to follow me into battle. All these thoughts tumble into my consciousness in the hallway, in a matter of seconds.Phoebe has already left us to speak to the journalist that is doing a piece on her supper club for a Norwegian publication. She is showing them ingredients that will feature in tonight’s meal. She speaks quickly, gesturing a lot, often hard to understand. Even though I am speaking to other guests, I catch snippets of what she is saying “this is like lychee, we dry it…this is a special pepper…good for skin, gets rid of water.”I had been expecting a nice Chinese meal but this sounds medicinal, mystical.

When the rest of the guests arrive, we are invited to start with the canapés. Peeled tomatoes in vinegar, to get the appetite going we are told. Deep fried green olives in a Parmesan and wasabi crust. Ricotta and soy panna cotta with a sprinkling of cracked pepper in a pool of vivid grassy olive oil. Read more of this post

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3 Minutes sur Mer!, French Food, Mitte

February 3, 2012 Leave a Comment

3 Minutes sur Mer!

Exclamation point indeed.

Ask and certain people will tell you.  Berlin isn’t ready for pricey restaurants.  That is why so many places open up only to close.  The market is just not here yet.  Give ‘em cheap and give ‘em lots.

Pants

Exclamation point.I made a lunch date at 1:30 with a girlfriend.  ”Should I call ahead to make a reservation.” she asked.  ’Who needs a reservation for lunch in Berlin? On Torstrasse? On a Wednesday?  Even for an offshoot of Bandol Sur Mer, bound to be popular.’  That was my thinking at least.  Flawed thinking I soon came to realize, as I huffed and puffed my way up Torstrasse in my two pairs of trousers, 4 shirts, 1 fleece and 1 coat and a cashmere pashmina wrapped around my waist to combat the devastation this arctic weather is wreaking on my lower back (Born in Kuwait people – which by the way – is where you will find me if this cold doesn’t let up.).The place was throbbing with custom.  Screen away the surrounding buildings and 3 Minutes could have been off the Seven Dials in London or in the Latin Quarter in Paris.  Blockbuster cities with a fair number of wealthy inhabitants.  I snagged the only table just in time. Read more of this post

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Essen Fassen, German Food, Charlottenburg

February 2, 2012 4 Comments

I went to Essen Fassen over a year ago and had such a mixed experience that I just took the whole thing, put it on a virtual shelf and promptly forgot about it. Then last week a friend suggested we meet there for lunch. A friend whose goulash I love and whose 3 male gendered children eat calves liver on (while my child only eats white food; pasta shaped like zoo animals, Philadelphia cream cheese, yogurt with crunchy pieces shaped like hoops, or stars, peanut butter with jam – no bits in either component).  Needless to say if this girl says it’s good, it must be good and I must be wrong.Still…

“Really?” I asked “Don’t you just want to go to Brot und Butter?  I had some weird food there last time.”

“Huh.  I had a lentil dish the other day and it was very good.  What did you have?”

“Leg of goose, I think there may have been some chocolate involved in the sauce, red cabbage, spaetzle.  All delicious if ridiculously enormous a portion large enough to feed two – which by the way it ended up doing because Hrabi’s dish of spaetzle with sweet and salty peanut sauce was inedible.  Then for dessert a dry chocolate brownie, corners showing signs of age, with a yummy plum compote of which ironically, there was not enough.”

“Ok, let’s go to Brot und Butter.”

“No, you know what? I need to get out of Mitte, my blog is becoming overly Mittecentric.And so we did which is a good thing because my lunch was great and I realized that I much prefer the restaurant during the day.  At night it’s a little bit too dim and quiet, it makes me think of long winters spent visiting my grandmother who only ever had (still has) one feeble lightbulb in her 10 lightbulb chandelier.  During the day, light bounces off the large white oval table (Ikea, I have the same one) onto the lovely silver and slate wallpaper.  There are more guests adding warmth to the surroundings.  The large (in stature) waiter, who because of his height, can give you quite a fright when he appears, lurch like, out of the shadows is significantly tempered by daylight.I’m not sure if this is a lunch thing or a-year-has-passed-since-you-last-ate-here thing but the food arrived on trays, with the napkin folded into a triangle to one side, cutlery on top.  You keep the tray under your plate as you eat.  I quite liked that detail, it made me think of times (long, long ago) when I used to look forward to what surprises and delights my airplane meal might have in store for me.  Or when I am oh so blissfully alone (can count on my pinky toe how often this happens) because someone else has my child and is taking care that she is eating her white food, my husband (often culinarily challenged) has made other arrangements and I can make my food exactly how I like, place it all neatly on a tray, perch it on my knees and watch something I want to see while eating food that is not only delicious but still hot!  (Ah, the craziness that such trivial details can induce.) Read more of this post

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Apple Cake with Brown Sugar and Treacle Icing

January 30, 2012 5 Comments

There is an expected amount of causality in cooking as in life.  Want a nice body? Diet and exercise (or if you’ve got a wad of spare cash, lipo and pain).  Want to get ahead in the world? Work your butt off.

So it follows, want to make superlative baked goods?  You need a certain amount of skill (acquired over time) and some expensive kit comes in handy (Hello? Making marshmallows without a stand mixer? Much much harder.).   So when I come across a recipe that is easy and fast to make, I am skeptical to the extreme.  Regardless of my doubts, out comes a fluffy moist cake, not too sweet, enhanced by a spectacular icing that takes the cake from healthy tasting (think oven baked apples) to one of those cakes where you scrape maniacaly at any streaks of icing left on the plate.Frankly, it makes everything feel a little topsy turvy, like finding a €10 note on an empty street, making a show of bending down to pick it up.  Pivoting on your planted feet this way and that, note held up high (as proof that you attempted to look for the person to whom it might belong) before shrugging your shoulders and tucking it into your pocket.  You still feel a little guilty though, don’t you? That this good luck was bestowed on you while some poor sod is looking for his tenner (Unless it’s my husband.  Walk behind him. He loses money every time he reaches into his pocket.  Shall I describe him to you?) Read more of this post

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Sabzi, Cheap Oriental Food, Mitte

January 26, 2012 7 Comments

The team behind Sabzi excel at making much out of little.  They’ve taken what should be a dark dinky basement space and turned it into a serene place, with abstract filigree wall paintings that mimic the overall shape of the sign outside.  A girl with sleek hair, the colour of charcoal, thick eyelashes and similarly thick voice serves from the selections of 5 to 6 stew like dishes from food warmers.  All for €4.50.You get a lot for €4.50 here.  Normally I would argue in the vein of Linda Evangelista, who once famously said they (supermodels) don’t get out of bed in the morning for less than $10’000, that a cook wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning for a cut price lunch deal.  The crew (skeleton though I am assuming it is) do.  Hurrah for that!  It saves Mitte from another uninspired offering of meatballs and mash or bratkartoffeln with (umm, with what? I never order these things).  Or cut price sushi.  Or some vaguely Vietnamese – Thai soup.

In a sea of spuds and pork, these guys are offering fluffy rice that smells like it’s been toasted with a few generous ladles of stew.  Vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.  Although I always get the vegetarian option.  For about 3 reasons: 500g a week is what is recommended to ward off certain cancers; the rearing of red meat is straining to the planet; I abhor generic meat, it’s tantamount to eating that weird mouldable cheese that comes packed in individual plastic sheets and calling that Keen’s Cheddar Cheese. Read more of this post

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Baker & Spice’s Lemon Cake

January 22, 2012 18 Comments

Despite having a multitude of baking books, too many to count (Ok getting up to count: 28), I tend to return to the same two titles; Baking with Passion (Baker & Spice) and Breakfast, Lunch and Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery.  Both books are oldies but goodies, the first having been published in 1999 with numerous reprints and the second in 2006.

Both are books that came out of successful shops, which makes a world of difference when talking success rate in your kitchen.  One thing is to have a home economist who had a make over, a spin through a PR machine to emerge glistening from the other side with a collection of recipes she has pawned from her peers, substituting almond essence for vanilla here and cocoa powder there.  Quite another is to have a book full of baked goods based on those that people line up and part with their money for.Yet another distinguishing feature is that Baker and Spice was the brain child of Gail Stephens (penned by Dan Lepard – who everybody worships these days and Richard Wittington) while Rose Bakery that of Rose Carrarini (also one of the co-founders of Villandry in London) both women.  (Massive generalization coming – can one start a sentence with parenthesis? Does anything really go on a blog? Or have I taken it to far this time?) Shops run by women seem to share certain characteristics; food tends to be un-embellished, think of a male peacock with his attention grabbing tail versus the demure female; absence of gilding doesn’t translate into absence of taste, the spartan cheese plate at La Formagerie (Patricia and Danny Michelson) is the best cheese plate you will ever have in the world, anywhere, ever.  Shops conceived by women somehow feel like the equivalent of someone who uses a Dove soap bar to wash their face and Nivea cream as a moisturizer, producing shiny naturally rouged cheeks with a few life lines thrown in for good measure; practical, real, genuine, dependable, good.

A lot of words to say that the recipes from Baker and Spice always work, you won’t find a recipe for Crack Pie in here but then tell me, who wants to wait 15 hours for a pie? (I did have a look through Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook but it left me a little cold, like Heston Blumenthal’s books.) Read more of this post

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Auf Die Hand, Fine Fastfood, Mitte

January 19, 2012 4 Comments

Auf die hand is my local. Unexpectedly, it means I rarely eat there  because it’s so close to my house that it seems lazy not to take a few more steps to my flat and make my own lunch.  On the other hand, its proximity comes in handy on occasions when I need to meet people for coffee and don’t know them well enough to invite them to the flat or on one of those exceedingly rare occasions when I am running out for an early appointment or best one yet, when I am going to the Zoo or any other such  destination where the food is bound to be inferior.I was underwhelmed by auf die hand when I first moved into the flat and everyone kept telling me it was there.  It just seemed like a gussied up Pret a Manger and there was no way I was going to miss the bane of the triangle sandwich chain or so I smugly thought…  Smugness it turns out, is closely related to Pride – one of the seven deadly sins.  (I don’t need a film starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman to know it’s bad form to indulge in these bad boys)  Now I often find myself hankering after a free range egg salad sandwich or a chunky humous salad wrap.  (Although I would still insist on the sandwich coming to something resembling room temperature)Like the Prets and Eats of the UK, auf die hand does soups, stews, cakes, cookies and a warm meal of the day which goes for around €6.50 (It bears noting that for €3 more, you can go around the corner to Traube and have the special of the day or for €4.50 you can descend into the subterranean world of Persian food at Sabzi- open for lunch only and then there is the newly opened Jones Food Store on Reinhardstrass which I’ve yet to try but looks promising).  The €6.50 hot lunch price tag garners a lot of disapproval from its benefactors who are sensitive to the unspoken lunch rule of nothing over €5 that persists in Berlin.  Despite this, they are heaving at lunch, throw a little sunshine into the mix – when auf die hand put out their candy coloured chairs – and the shelves are bare by 3.  Which is just as well since they shut at 6. Read more of this post

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