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

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 732 other followers