Das Lokal, German Bistro, Mitte

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

Muret la Barba, Winebar and Bistro, Mitte

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

Smart Deli, Japanese Fast Food, Mitte

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

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

Themroc, one choice, 3 cooks, Mitte

Themroc, Torstraße 183, Mitte

 The Themroc ‘concept’, if you will, is one menu served to all. One menu meaning the same starter, main course and dessert. We don’t all have to eat it at once, in fact the cook prefers it if the seatings are staggered. That’s not all. There are three cooks. Yorgos a Greek artist, Laurent who was also our waiter the night we went and a Persian (who wasn’t there but is the owner, we were told).  Of the 6 days they are open, each day has a different menu.

They serve 34 people a night and most nights they are full.  The food doesn’t start coming out until around 7:30 - 8:00.  More like 8:00 pm.

Laurent takes periodical cigarette breaks out front and after most of the mains have gone out, Yorgos starts doing the same.   Laurent tells us that at midnight, they have to move the party indoors where everyone can stay as long as they want, drinking and chatting.

The green and white awning and Laurent whizzing past with drinks

The whole concept and place made me think of the closing months of my senior year.  The hard work is over, once feral teachers have turned all fuzzy around the edges, random moments seem poignant because you know that this is it: life will never again be this simple.  You are in an atypical and unusual window of time.  As a result, you (me, back then) are over-confident, slightly euphoric, brimming with possibilities.

Grilled courgette, goat cheese and mushroom

I kept feeling wisps of that all night at Themroc and I get it in a lot of other places in Berlin.  The city is still flush with whimsical concepts like this one and what’s more they do well.  I suppose some might say it’s one of the draws of Berlin. Read more of this post

Reinstoff, 2* Michelin Food, Mitte

Update 2011 - Reinstoff received a second Michelin star this year, which is great news for them! Yay!  

I agonized over where to take my friend Stephen when he came to visit from London.  He has worked in so many Michelin starred kitchens (and recently, won his own) that if I was going to to take him somewhere fancy, it had to be good.  I settled on Reinstoff because it seemed inordinately difficult to get a table there, which is very ‘London’ in a city where most restaurants are closed for lunch because there isn’t enough custom.  Flicking through their slick website cinched my decision.

It’s hard to find Reinstoff, I wandered up and down the quiet residential street in Mitte twice wondering how I could have possibly missed such a striking restaurant?  Then, I remembered the word Höfe in the address and turned into one of the more modern buildings, into a cobblestone courtyard, and there it was, glowing, with the distinct metal orbs just visible through the gauzy curtains.

The space is genius, really, congratulations to that interior designer.  A wall of glass on one side, the remaining three walls each clad in a kind of rectangular cove into which tables of two (and a few four) are set, larger tables in the center, with glistening metal balls hanging from the ceiling at varying heights.  Industrial metal ventilation traverse the partly red brick ceiling bringing a rough contrast to precious design on the ground.

The lighting architect deserves the second award, there are spots of bright light which fade abruptly into inky darkness, the combination of light and dark, glistening and matt, all work together to make a very comfortable room and although beautiful and modern, not intimidating at all.

Read more of this post

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