Galeria Kaufhof, Food Hall, Mitte

February 22, 2012 8 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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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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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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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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Das Lokal, German Bistro, Mitte

December 23, 2011 14 Comments

True story.

Day before yesterday, car full of all my Christmas food shopping, I returned to the garage to see that someone was parked in our spot. (Yes, we own a car. No, it doesn’t keep me up at night, wondering if I will go to emissions hell – it’s a hybrid, although we didn’t know that when we got it…)  I huffed and I puffed, I got out and touched the offending car’s bonnet.  Hot.  He’d just arrived, parking spot stealing bastard!  I took a picture of the car with my iPhone, emailed it to the garage landlord.  I turned my car around, found a parking spot on the street, got out (in the rain) fed €3 into the meter went upstairs.  Printed out  VERMIETET (yes the capitals are absolutely necessary) on an A4 sheet of paper, put in it a plastic sheet and stomped back out of the house (in the rain but this time with an umbrella) to the garage where I fixed that to the wall.  I also left a note, the gist of which was ‘call me on this number once you’ve moved your vehicle out of my parking space pinhead!’.  Meanwhile the garage landlord writes to let me know I can park in the dentist’s bay.  I go back down (in the rain, still with the umbrella), move the car and because I am feeling petty, affix the €3 ticket to the car’s windshield.  Then I putter around my kitchen until 1 hour later, the phone rings.
Hello?
Hello. I am the man who parked in your space.
Ok – so you’re leaving now?
Yes, I am so sorry.
That’s fine.
Um, well, where should I leave the €3?
The wha..?  Oh – yes, don’t worry, it’s fine.
More apologizing.
I hang up.Once again, the disparity between most German people and every other European citizen is glaringly apparent.  Most German people will always do the right thing, even when no one is looking.  So if I left someone in a room with a jar of cookies and these instructions.  ”Do not eat the cookies.  If for some unfathomable reason you do eat a cookie, pinch yourself really hard on the arm as punishment.”  I think, the majority would not eat the cookie and the minority would eat the cookie and pinch themselves.  No one would say, scan the room for hidden cameras or strain their ears to make sure no one was approaching before saying…What? F**k it, I’m leaving and I’m taking the cookie jar with me. Read more of this post

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Muret la Barba, Winebar and Bistro, Mitte

December 20, 2011 4 Comments

After having lunch with my friend Katie at Muret la Barba the other day, I’ve decided she should definitely have a Berlin restaurant blog.  She eats out about 3 times as much as I do and is always trying new places.  She’s already been to Hartweizen on Torstrasse (her verdict, good, a lot of game dishes).  Restaurant 3 (which I had never even heard of but of course the New York Times had already written about in 2009 for chrissakes!).  And she’s been to Das Lokal  or Kantine which was featured in Cee Cee‘s 24th newsletter.
When she suggested a long over due lunch, I said “Let’s go to Muret la Barba.”

“Don’t tell me you still haven’t eaten there!” she teased.

As a matter of fact, I hadn’t.  I don’t know what I’ve been eating lately?  (Oh yes, I do!  The large krakow sausages, straight off the grill with jagged blackened pieces covering one side and an obscene amount of mustard at the Christmas Market behind Galeria.  It’s a Polish sausage and Polish sausages, IMHO, RULE.  They’re firm fleshed, dry, smoky, spicy, with an extraordinary snap to the skin, you need to give it a really good tug before it breaks off.  I’m particular to a stand directly behind Galeria, exiting through the make up and bag department.  They only sell two things; a bratwurst – €2.50 and the Krakow – €3.50.  Confession? As I write this I am plotting one last trip to the Krakow stand before I fly of to Miami on the 27th).
Back to Muret la Barba.  It’s one of Katie’s lunch places, she always get’s the homemade ravioli (whatever the filling) and a salad.  I followed her cue and did the same.  Out came 5 large square ravioli, the size of my entire hand, filled with ricotta and greens, sitting in about 150g of Parmesan flavoured butter (€7.50).  We shared a salad of beetroot, apple, cracked wheat and lettuce – something I could imagine making for myself at home, the freshness of which cut through the richness of the ravioli.

A delicious homemade ravioli lunch for €7.50? Perfect.  More than that however, I’m totally seduced by the vibe of MLB.  It takes leave from the typical Italian places around here, which feel contrived, the available Italians working within, turning up their Italianess to pander to the locals who seem as addicted to all things Mediterranean as they are to the sun.  Instead they keep things simple with a few unexpected bits, each one telling me a story, like: Read more of this post

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Cocolo, Ramen Shop, Mitte

December 11, 2011 8 Comments

Cocolo is open for dinner only, from 6pm to midnight. After spending last week reading about David Chang’s pilgrimage down the ramen route in Tokyo in issue 1 of Lucky Peach, I had an acute craving.  I got there early, at 15 minutes to 6. Not so much because I anticipated a line but because I was starving and couldn’t trust myself not to stop off somewhere and ruin my appetite (as the half eaten butter pretzel from Hofpfisterei in my handbag could attest) or fill my belly up with a liter of sweet flavoured tea from the newly opened ‘Starbucks of the east’: Comebuy.  My stomach was growling as I approached Cocolo and there, hoping from one foot to another to stay warm, were three people.I took out issue 2 of Lucky Peach, leaned against the wall and tried to steady myself with thoughts of noodles.  A Japanese family of 4 arrived to join us.  5 to 6.  1 to 6.  Doors open.  We shuffle in.  In the next 5 minutes all the seats are taken and there are people standing by the wall waiting for us to order, eat, pay and go.I sat with my back to the front window, looking into the kitchen (which I think is the best place to sit because you can see what they are doing and are sheltered from the regular opening of the door).  You do get splashed a little because on the other side of the bar is the sink in which they wash the dishes (by hand) during service (spoons go into the adjacent ceramic hand wash basin for some reason).I had already tried the Tonkotsu (a milky looking broth made from pork bones, fat and collagen) so I ordered the Shoyu: a broth salty from soy sauce.  Hrabi ordered Tan Tan, a spicy soup with minced meat and corn. We also got kimchi, gyoza and edamame.  Embarrassingly, the only gyoza I’d had previous to these were at Wagamama (not that I am knocking Wagamama you understand, I would kill to have a Wagamama in Berlin! It’s fast food but it’s good fast food.), these were in a different category altogether, I would go back for the gyoza alone.  The edamame came in a slated wooden box, with a sheet of paper from a Japanese magazine fashioned into a box perched on top – for discarding spent edamame shells.Details like that get me because they are indicative of a perfectionist at work.  To take the time to fashion a paper box, when any old dish would do, is rare.

There are more details and quirks.  The small but deep wire noodle sieves that line the wall, the timers over the heads of cooks that are set when a new batch of noodles go in.  The orders displayed on the white fridge, fastened with black magnets, because there isn’t one centimeter of space left in the kitchen, let alone a 30 cm for an order slide rack.  There is only one cutting board (black) meat is sliced on it, eggs are halved.  The gyoza are cooked on a grill the size of a paperback novel.  The bare bulbs sport coffee filters as lamp shades, yellow with age (Hrabi spotted that one).   Read more of this post

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Smart Deli, Japanese Fast Food, Mitte

December 1, 2011 15 Comments

You know those pervasive Berlin bakery sandwiches? The multi seeded brown bun with green lettuce poking out like a frilly petticoat? Which when you open, reveals a shriveled  up slice of skin on cucumber, cut exaggeratedly on the bias. A slice of cheese, dark brown and curled in the corners with a pale imprint of the once moist cucumber on its belly.  Salami, a slice so thin you could read your newspaper through it, glowing like it is lying in a fluorescent cabinet – except of course it’s not. One bite makes the inflated sandwich collapse into a chaos of sharp shard like crumbs; it seems to be all crust.  I don’t do those sandwiches.

Sure, like all people new to the city, I was excited by the prospect of sandwich that did not come in a triangle, served at 4°C but after a few I declared the sandwich genre in Berlin bakeries ‘dead to me’.Which is a pain because it means I have no easy work free solution for lunch.  It is a bore to make food for yourself twice a day.  Especially when the little diva seems to subsist on a diet of white things and needs separate meals made up (and then more often than not, thrown out when they don’t meet her exasperating standards.  Oh and what sounds like unguarded rage towards my offspring is more like an unabating amazement at the wool that Mommyhood can consistently pull over my eyes.) and then dishes need to be washed, dried and put away.  At the same time, I don’t like things on bread, in between slices of bread.  I like my sandwiches to be gourmet and that takes just as much work as a hot meal.Some days I debate whether it is a frivolous waste of time to get on the M1 tram to Nazuna in Prenzlauerberg so I can have a pitch perfect bento box.  With the pram and the kid, convincing the kid that she needs sock and shoes – it’s all too much to contemplate especially when it means that it will be the only thing I do that day and I will come home once again to be confronted with “What in the world shall I make for dinner? For me? For her?” Read more of this post

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Schmidt’s Deli Deluxe, Mitte

November 9, 2011 8 Comments

I kept thinking about Spaceballs (the Mel Brooks parody of Star Wars) when I heard this deli had opened. Maybe it’s the Schmidt* (coming from blacksmith) compared to ‘the Schwartz’ (a Mel Brooks combination of the words ‘schwarz’ meaning black in German and ‘schwantz’ being the Yiddish slang for penis).  Not exactly linear thought, I’ll give you that, but that’s the way my saturated-with-TV as-a-teenager-brain works (when let’s face it, TV was SO much better!).There are definitely some oddball factors at play here.  Like Schmidt’s is in a unnaturally quiet pocket of Mitte (not peaceful like where Alpenstueck is, more dead, like the people have left the city type feeling).  It’s next to The Dude hotel (I’m not going to succumb to the obvious jokes on this one but by all means, you go ahead).  In the window are two white chairs, a white table on top of which sit two highly polished metal domes, the kind which waiters used to remove from your plate with a flourish to reveal still warm, albeit small portions of Nouvelle Cuisine some 40 years ago. (Points out of 10 for deli relevance? 0)

There is a neon in the window (which is sadly turned off, 4/10), when I step into the blasting hot room of the deli I am met by a woman in a stiff Iron Chef-Cat Cora type jacket, in fact come to think of it, this lady could have been her older sister, with blond hair shorn in a neat and orderly bob; worn with a hairband, which she pushed forward to make a little bump of hair.  Cat Cora’s older sister and a young chef manned the space behind the counter, which housed a compact kitchen and the till.  On the other side was a red dining room that was off bounds, serving as the breakfast room for The Dude hotel.  You could perch on one of the high three tables under a large black and white painting of a man eating and a woman farting – no smiling (but doesn’t that smile look like she’s just let one rip?). Read more of this post

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