Kochhaus Delivers

On Thursday night, the buzzer rang. Thinking it was a delivery for a neighbour, I let them in.  My name was said, a paper to be signed was thrust forward and two large bags were handed over.  I frantically flipped through the empty rolodex in my head trying to find the words to say “This is not for me!” But the man was already gone.

Then I remembered, the email from Kochhaus letting me know they would be sending over some food.  I was sceptical about the concept but nothing like a load of free stuff to change your mind.  Ha!  No, I’m kidding (kind of, you might think the guy who sent over a drink, sitting at the end of the bar is a total sleaze but secretly you’re pleased that he went to the trouble because even from way down there he thinks you are wonderful - that or he has money to burn and he’s been pulling that stunt all night hoping someone will bite.)Kochhaus is doing in Berlin what premium online supermarkets  in London have been doing for years: thinking up a recipe, photographing it in a flattering light so that it gets your juices going, working out portion sizes and sending the food over.  By providing this service in Berlin (where most bricks and mortar supermarkets look like they’ve been hit in the face with a sack of ugly and the idea of an online service shopping service seems decades away) Kochhaus have found their niche.A few things niggle me, namely an over reliance on the stove top (I use my oven where I can to avoid smelling like a line cook) and that their meat and two veg approach means you end up using a lot of pans.  Although I was thinking that perhaps if they had sent me over a pasta bake scenario, I might feel hard done by whereas the way they are building up the meal there is more value in all the individual parts. Read more of this post

DUDU, Pan Asian Food, Mitte

(Update February 2012.  Reading through this post, I realize I didn’t describe the food very well.  It’s a mish mash of Asian things, not authentic or sophisticated, big portions, Mori style combinations.)

I’ve never hankered after one of those classic beige and brown Louis Vuitton totes, the ones that never go on sale and purportedly out of fashion. Not wanting a Louis Vuitton bag in Berlin is no biggie because obvious brand names (unless they’re vintage or second-hand, in which case they are ok) are avoided and ostentatious displays are in very bad taste, except in some parts of former West Berlin where girls in their twenties still wear pearl studs in their ears.  But from where I came, London, everyone wanted one.  No sooner had you scraped enough money together to buy the (cheaper) Marc by Marc Jacobs, an actual Marc Jacobs being the price of rent (although I do prefer the cheaper brand) then the season would change and it would be out with zips and in with something else.  (I don’t miss shopping for sport, or happiness, or whatever it was I was doing in London one little bit.  Although I admit that when I first moved here, it used to freak me out that the shops were - still are closed on Sundays.)All this to say, that even though I might deride those that have / want LVS bags I still love the guides.

Yes they do guide books, something you wouldn’t know unless you’ve braved the two behemoth security men that flank the door (if you have the chance, visit the gift shop at the Musee des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and browse at your leisure).  I discovered them quite by accident when I snuck into the Louis Vuitton Shop in Selfridges (much less scary to visit a concession).  I was intrigued, the European guide came as a box set only so I chose New York guide and it was like having a friend show me the city.  It wasn’t, as I had feared, filled with over priced, over hyped restaurants but with real jewels of the city.  Through LV New York I discovered Rice to Riches, a pickle shop (possibly this one), Shake Shack (oh I could so have a burger, curly fries and a frozen custard right now!).  It was a great trip, my husband was so impressed that I was such a local never noticing the thin chocolate box covered book I kept looking at.

In the LV Berlin Guide Dudu is listed, Transit and Kuchi aren’t.  I’ve been twice, both times for lunch.  I went for the set lunch each time.  First time I had a seaweed salad followed by a large sushi rice roll, filled with panko coated shrimp.  Second time, a soft rice paper roll and then again a large roll.  There are other things on the menu besides large rolls but I haven’t tried them yet since I can’t resist the €8 menu.  Going by those rolls, I imagine it’s all good.  Which considering their tiny kitchen (so tiny, that on one occasion I spotted veg prep being done in the hallway of the school above the restaurant) is impressive.

Don’t go by the picture on their homepage, in fact think the opposite.  As opposed to a blindingly white restaurant, you will be sitting in a cosy room, sharing communal tables and benches.  Service is very friendly.  In the summer everyone crowds into the small terrace in front of the restaurant, among the birdcages the potted plants and dark bamboo screens blocking out the traffic of Torstrasse.

Dudu
Torstr. 134
10119 Mitte
T. 030 51736854
www.dudu-berlin.de

Coledampf’s & Companies, Kitchen Accessories & Cafe, Kreuzberg

Coledampfs third store (this one with partners) in Berlin, is in Kreuzberg and it is incredible!  I’d heard about its imminent birth for some time but I just though “bah”.  I never imagined something of this retail magnitude was what they had in mind.  I would stick it up there with Williams Sonoma and Sur La Table.  A toned down European version of course because no one can compete (or tries to) with the volume, the ‘oh so shiny and new’ and bright displays that instantly convince you (me) that: Yes, you (me) absolutely must have the electric Zoku popsicle maker with accompanying book. (Even though the last time I ate a popsicle, I still had some of my milk teeth in.) of the American market. This Coledampf doesn’t have the variety that the Savignyplatz shop has, notably absent are plastics (spatulas, Tupperware, moulds).  Instead there is a stunning collection of de Buyer pots and pans; chefy tools, about 10 formats of conical strainers; glassware; dishes; German wines, from the 13 growing regions; a tower of Cynthia Barcomi’s aluminum bakeware; and books - 1 shelf of which is in English.There is a focus on craftmanship, environmental sustainability and regional goods.  As I understand it, Coledampf’s & Companies is a collaboration between the big, the good and the virtuous; bread from Beumer & Lutum; the culinary bookstore Kochlust; a range of edible products from Essbare Landschaften, I gathered that they are the ones that run the cooking school; something (opinion maybe?) from Garcon magazine.I don’t really need the partner credentials, it could be a collaboration between the 7 dwarfs and I would still love it.  The enormous space (500 sq ft), the large communal tables, the freedom to amble along slowly and peruse the contents of the shop without being verbally tackled by an exasperated sales person that wants to know if ‘you’re just wasting their time or what?!?!’.

But the best part?

You can order food.There is a cafe on the ground level and a warm food cafe upstairs.  From memory, the menu upstairs went something like this: a celeriac soup, a pan-fried salmon, a regional duck dish, a pear dessert. Entirely seasonal, with not a raspberry or asparagus spear insight to dilute credibility.  With dinner at Renger Patzsch not far off on the horizon of the evening.  I ordered a soup and a dessert.  The kitchen is open and has some super strength extraction because although the salmon was coming out with perfectly crispy skin, I couldn’t smell it being cooked.  The chefs plate up on the open pass, as professional as if it were the pass at Maze, then *ping* goes the little silver bell and the order is expedited to the table. (Mains are in the €12-€15 range but look to be worth every euro.) Read more of this post

Peking Ente, Chinese Food, Mitte

Chinese restaurant = chopsticks - right?

Well not necessarily.

Go the cheap Chinese take away route and you get plenty of them.  Even if the only vaguely Chinese thing about the food is a splash of soy sauce and bean sprouts. Visit one of the hipster pan asian restaurants instead (Kuchi, Dudu or Transit, say) and you are free to help yourself to the chopsticks huddled in a pot on the table.  Actual Chinese restaurant, where the titles of the dishes don’t read like a possible contender for the name of the next Kung Fu Panda, not a chopstick in sight.  Nor any dinky miniature bowls which you can bring up to your mouth to snarfle up that rice with minimum droppage.  You get a flat plate so that your piping hot food is arctic and congealed within a matter of minutes.

Chinese food eaten off the tines of a metal fork isn’t the same.  In the same way that Arabic food eaten with cutlery is just wrong (and no you don’t stick your fingers in your mouth and then in the food, you use flat bread as a scooping device and put that into your mouth or else use the flatbread as an edible handkerchief to remove big pieces of food).  Dealing with Chinese food in Berlin, the lack of chopsticks is almost besides the point.  It just doesn’t taste like Chinese food.  Or rather, the Westernized version of Chinese food that I’ve become accustomed to over 13 years of living in London.  It mostly tastes like something that would come out of a jar, overly sweet, too much cornflour.  I almost hear the thwak of the suction going as they open the jar, the bloop bloop bloop as the gloopy contents spill out into the pan.  I can’t.  Seriously? Just can’t.  Not worth it, just hand over the sausage and the bratkartoffeln and leave me to my memories.Still, I break down because  I need Chinese food even more than I need Arabic food (although someone please tell me where I can get some good humus and labneh around here? Turkish supermarkets don’t seem to carry it.  Are there no Arabs in Berlin?).

Peking Ente was recommended to me by a friend from Hong Kong, the same one that took me Tian Fu.  And I’ve been there about 5 times now.  I even celebrated my birthday there.  I wanted somewhere laid back and Chinese food is so congenial and promotive to good times and easy laughs.  But also, I wanted to know what they thought.  Because having been here a year, I wasn’t at all sure whether Peking Ente had become my regular weekend haunt out of desperation or because it’s good. Read more of this post

Slow Braised Chicory with Orange & Juniper (Happy Birthday to Me! And dark kitchen secrets)

I have these oven gloves.  They came free with Easy Living magazine (which I don’t normally read you understand, it was just that one time….).  They were obviously, cheap and thin (even though the tag optimistically announced they were Laura Ashley).  There was one novel thing about them: they were my size.  I wear a size 36 shoe, accordingly, my hands are little and finding oven gloves that fit is challenging.  In fact I’ve never managed to do it.  Which is why the Easy Living, Laura Ashley gloves survived and even thrived in my kitchen for many years, too many.  Plenty of essential kitchen items got culled but not these gloves.  They didn’t age well, their dubious quality ensured that I routinely sustained minor burns.  I did go out and try to find a replacement.  I even considered splashing out and buying myself a pair of Marimekko gloves and they don’t sell those babies as a pair, no, it’s per glove.  They were enormous though, I could have worn them on my head like some kind of a statement hat.All this to say that I have these gloves which are the kitchen equivalent to the gray granny underwear we all have, the one with the broken elastic, that look hideous but you can rely on never to ride up your bum, or leave imprints on your body (how could they with their malfunctioning elastic?).  You wouldn’t part with those for good money at the same time, you would never let anyone see them!  Same deal with these gloves, when I have friends over, I tuck them away in a corner and rely on kitchen towels.  Except last week, when I threw a dinner party for a few girlfriends and had enlisted the help of my friend Luisa.  I was off schedule to the point that the cold starter that was supposed to be served from the fridge, thereby allowing me to natter on with my guests, was not even started.  Luisa caught me off guard when she asked for the oven gloves, I nonchalantly surrendered their hiding place.  Then I realized and froze.Her eyes crinkled as she smiled and held them up to the light. “What are these?”
“My oven gloves.”
“Sooooo when you serve people, they get crumbled bits of oven glove in their food?” she teased.
“Umm, ya well, you see, I have small…” blah blah blah, all the stuff I said before but really in that moment I was BUSTED.She knew.
I knew.
She knew, I knew, she knew. (Say that fast 5 times)
“Well that’s what you can buy me for my birthday.” I tried to recover. But let’s be honest, there really is no way to recover from that.  All I could do was hope that she would find it endearing, a little like Daniel Cleaver when confronted with Bridget Jones’s ‘stomach holding underpants’. Read more of this post

Friedrichshain: Aunt Benny’s, Cafe; Kinkibox, sewing cafe; La Récréation, Ceramics; Hops & Barley, micro-brewery; Olivia, Chocolate & Cafe; Goldschmiede, jewellery

At this juncture, I would say that I know Mitte inside out; Prenzlauerberg very well; I am surprisingly well-informed on where to eat in Kreuzberg; Charlottenburg is pretty shaky; Schöneberg, vaguer still; Friedrichshain had been blank (with the exception of Cupcake which I visited only once); don’t even get me started on places like Wilmersdorf it might as well be a different city, in fact from what I hear - it kind of is.While the weather was ‘Fa la la la la, la, la, la, laaaaaa‘ glorious, I took out my new copy of Tip’s Speisekarte (in which I got a mention on a special they did on food bloggers - Yay!) and plotted out a few addresses to try out. Then I printed out the google map and off I went with a girlfriend to explore.Yes, I’m a geek of epic proportions. Something it’s taken me a long time to embrace but now that I have, you know what? Geeks have much more fun.Annoyingly, two of the places I had been looking forward to trying were closed on Tuesday (Factory Girl! and Melt) but Aunt Benny’s was open. It has a similar aesthetic to places like The Barn or Bäckerei from the Alpentstueck group, namely, black painted walls, designer bare bulbs, good staff / service. I was still full from tasting a lot of mediocre food along our tour (places I won’t name because they were unoriginal even in their shortcomings) but I couldn’t resist the chickpea and kidney bean salad with rocket in a large weck jar.At that point the tour was over and it had been disappointing. The extraordinary number of young Europeans on the streets told me that there was more to Friedrichshain. Layla nodded off in her pram which gave me ample time to follow my nose.

(Note to self: always rely on the nose!)

I turned up some truffles, not all culinary but you don’t mind if I go off brief every now and again?

First up: La Récréation, a ceramic workshop with dishes so pretty they made me think of pastel coloured, Pierre Hermé macaroons. I wanted to buy a set then and there and thankfully was impeded from doing so by a man who actually was buying an entire dinner set.

Read more of this post

Ackerplatz market, Däri - Milk Workshop, The Circus of the Cycling Spoons and loving Berlin right now

You know how when you fall in love with someone?  You are utterly goo goo ga ga over how great they are? Exciting, unpredictable (in a good way), friendly. Then you suddenly find them reckless, unpredictable (in a bad way), and what you took to be friendliness, is actually horniness (and they hit on all your girlfriends, all the time)*. Most times that’s when you expedite them to the nearest exit.  Except on the very rare occasion where you see them stripped down and you think, yep, I get you and I still love you (yeah, close your mouth dear, I’m as surprised as you are).My guess is that this is probably why almost 95% of love stories are about an unrequited / misunderstood love that is requited / understood for a blink before one or both of them dies. Romeo & Juliet? Had they lived, he would have probably become a shoe salesman and she would sport a bouffant red hair do.

Because it’s complicated, intangible even to express what it is, how it works, why it works? (Oh and if you ask me, the characters of  Miracle Max and his wife run circles around all the afore-mentioned lovers.)It’s easy to be in love with someone before all the dots have been connected but once they have, well then you find yourself thinking - “That’s just a stupid drawing of a couple of kittens playing with a ball of yarn. How kitsch, how dull, I was expecting something else, I saw myself with someone better…” dump.It’s sort of the same with cities, you visit once and you think ‘Ah, to live here, I would be the happiest person in the world.’ Then you do and discover that actually you can’t put up with all the dog poop (Paris); all the over 70s (Geneva); can’t afford it (London); all the Hogans sports shoes (Munich); all the motorcycles without mufflers…oh, oh…and the imminent financial collapse (Athens) - you get my drift.But Berlin, Berlin.  Well yes: the bureaucrats are exceedingly good at telling you, you haven’t filled in the right form; receiving a flyer that says I must go collect my parcel at the post office leaves me shaking with fear (they’re mean to me); and my eyes roll so far into their sockets every time the supermarket counter girls get up from their seat to make sure I am not wheeling out a lifetime supply of diapers, that I have to pull out my compact mirror to help roll the back into their place. Buuuuuuttttt……The rest of Berlin is fantastic.

You just need to step out of your door and let things happen to you.  No plan, necessary, no money even (although that certainly helps). Read more of this post

Margaux, *, The Vegetable Menu, Mitte

I’m going to make this one short because as a rule, I don’t dwell on disappointments and that is what Margaux was.

You have 2 choices at Margaux, the vegetarian menu (€125 although on their website it is advertised as €110) for which it is known and a fish and meat menu (€175 again the website says €140).  Our table had decided on the vegetarian menu before we had even set foot in the restaurant.  You see, Margaux has its own vegetable garden in the Potsdam area where it grows 200 heirloom varieties of vegetables.  Things like Mexican cucumber, a vegetable the size and shape of a kumquat but which looks like it could be a mini dinosaur egg. Good right? Exciting even! (For someone like me)

The aspirations didn’t translate onto the plate.  At all.  There were entire dishes which were bewildering to my friends and I.  One in particular of blanched vegetable sticks lined up on a plate, the way you would do for a child, with packet of store-bought carrot sticks.  And look at the carrot stick, it’s not even uniformly cut! You know when we learned that one at Leiths? Day 1, the same day we made chunky chickpea dip.   Read more of this post

Efa’s, Frozen Yogurt, Mitte

Frozen yogurt.

Why bother?

Am I right?

It’s a little like saying, “I’m in the mood for something bland, something white.”

“Snow?”

“Nope, frozen yogurt.”In Miami over Christmas, I developed a taste for  Yogen Früz.  They do a dizzying array of flavours and make them ‘fresh’ for your order; meaning they feed what looks a like soap bar (but is in reality a frozen fruit bar) into a machine that blends it with frozen yogurt.  It’s highly addictive, especially chocolate frozen yogurt with Reese’s Pieces candies strewn on top.  And yes, I know that by ordering that I am totally missing the point of the whole low-fat thing but you haven’t tried it, you don’t know how good it is.

In Berlin however, frozen yogurt comes in one flavour: yogurt.  (Efa’s also does a seasonal flavour.)  Which is probably the more honest approach otherwise it’s a bit like tofu burgers.  Either you want tofu or you want a burger but to want both is like wanting a Siamesoodle (a cross between a Siamese cat and a poodle, don’t google it, I made it up).

Read more of this post

Rutz, Wine & Fine Food, Mitte

Rutz’s design is pure Barcelona. Maybe it’s the wooden slats that dress the outside of the building (makes me think of Cacao Sampaka) or the logo: a blood-red uneven circle, meant to emulate a wine ring. Or that upstairs there is a bustling 1 starred Michelin restaurant, with young friendly staff, in simple black shirts and trousers.Everyone is taken past the pass to their tables, which are bare, with only a heavy linen napkin on one side and a plain white candle, not in a glass but placed directly onto the table.

Laid back.

Relaxed.

We are given a table by the window.  Looking through the slats, past one of the grapevines that has been planted on the 1st floor balcony, Chausseestrasse looks positively charming.Which if you’ve ever walked down it, you know: it most definitely is not!

Like at Reinstoff (another Michelin starred restaurant which is just around the corner) we are given an amuse to start. A bowl of sprouting cress, jutting out of it are two wooden sticks with a cube of salmon topped of with a round orange ball and two miniscule testubes filled with a green liquid: a cold essence of curry. One of the waitresses comes over with the menu and begins to explain the concept. There’s a lot of talk about experiences and journeys and even my eyes start to glaze over as Hrabi reaches for his blackberry. We are told that we have to order the same dishes because there is ‘no way’ the kitchen can make us separate ones. That comment comes across as overly polemic until I realize that each dish is ‘interpreted’=served two ways. The menu concept proves a bit of a headache for the staff and the guests, who seem to all be foreign with a common language of English. They all have to sit through a 10 minute monologue. At some point the sommelier plops down on the chair next to the Japanese couple behind us when the concept proves to be too much for them.Really it’s simple. There is a theme, either an ingredient: olives or a feeling: ’15 minutes at the atlantic coast’. You pick one and then get two dishes using that idea or ingredient. You can go for a 3 themed menu which equates to 6 dishes and €105 or choose all 6 themes (the entire menu in fact) and get 12 dishes €180.We took the smallest one.  By the 4th main I opened the button on my trousers.  By the 2nd dessert, I pulled the zipper way down and carefully held my bag in front of me as a decoy as I walked out of the restaurant.  It was a lot of food.

Weird thing about the food; I liked it, individually but I didn’t feel like all the combinations Müller made were ideal.  Take the salmon with olives and cherries for example.  The salmon with its silvery crispy skin was textural deliciousness.  But the coupling of the olives and the cherries was muddy and muddled in my mouth, a little like wearing two shades of red, just not quite right.  The addition of the cocoa nibs, taken with the olives there was a hint of success but again the cherries just made that house of cards tumble-down.   Read more of this post

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