Pan-Asian and Hotel Vibes

Modern Art of Asia (MAOA) - Mitte

Last week I had the misfortune of landing in the wasteland otherwise known as Potsdamer Platz around dinner time. Don’t get me wrong – the place has a few redeeming features, like the Philharmonie, the Stabi, the film museum and the fact it’s never empty. And yet, finding something decent to eat over there appears to be a super-human ordeal. 

But we were hungry and the weather did not leave room for flexibility on the subject of location. So we were pretty much stuck where we were. Glossing over the dismal choice of restaurants available around the square that gave the world the traffic light, I could only shrug and grunt an undecipherable complaint about the desertification of central Berlin. With a choice of overpriced and sterile-looking venues, Potsdamer Platz really does feel like an urban desert with a few bright lights and never-ending loads of tourists.

We ended up marching into Modern Art of Asia, one of the sterile-looking restaurants on Leipziger Platz. The pan-Asian restaurant is always crammed pack with people and getting a table is not easy, which was – at lest – reassuring. The interior reminded me of the hotel aesthetics in Lost in Translation, the 90’s version: bright lights, long tables, basic colours. The concept reminded me of another concept that seems to have been left to rot somewhere in the 90’s: Mongolian buffets.

You must remember the loud rise and silent fall of Mongolian buffets. They were everywhere in the late 90’s: the concept was assembling a dish from scratch using available ingredients, as an able looking chef then took over one’s creation and turned it into a work of fine showmanship on a scary looking grill. The same applies here. The menu is fairly basic, with a few starters and horribly overpriced drinks. The main course, however, is the buffet, available as a stuff-your-plate-full-for-one-serving for 16.90 € or as a recurring extravaganza for 23.70 €. We decided to go for the buffet and ignore the rest.

Every serving consists of stuffing a bowl full of whatever ingredients one chooses to eat, selecting a marinade from a list of different options and handing that opus-magnum to the exhausted chefs slaving at the grill (unfortunately, MAOA offers no spectacular show of knife throwing at your food). The available ingredients start with basic things like onions and different sorts of vegetables (bell peppers, carrots, courgettes, etc.), move over to spices like chillies, coriander or dried fruit and end with a copious amount of meat and seafood. The meat selection is actually the best thing about the buffet, as it offers just about anything from duck through beef to kangaroo. The other ingredients, however, are not as exciting with vegetables and spices remaining very German (between broccoli and champignons). 

What a bowl looks like

The meat section

And yet, the main feature of the buffet is that je-ne-sais-quoi DIY experience. It’s fun to assemble things and come up with the most ludicrous combinations. The marinades (from blackberry-sake to fennel-garlic) are also pretty pleasing in most cases. They are fairly mellow and offer a diluted, Germanised sensation, but this should come as no surprise at a pan-Asian restaurant that looks like a hotel lobby. Which brings me to the bottom line: If you happen to be around Potsdamer Platz, have enough money to spend and feel like stuffing your face like a pig, be my guest, it’s fun. However, do not expect any refined experience of superior taste.

Overall Mark:

Modern Art of Asia
Leipziger Platz 8, 10117 Berlin
http://www.maoa.de

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Old Traditions Die Hard

Altes Europa - Mitte 

Considering the fact my life in Berlin is heavily based on lurking around in cafés and consuming copious amounts of cake, this blog has so far not been appreciative enough of one of the pillars of Berlin’s food culture: restaurant-cafés. Cafés with a real kitchen that serve real food. They are open all day long with most customers not necessarily showing up for the food, but rather for the coffee, cake and ambiance.

One such place is Altes Europa on Gipsstraße. With the years it has become one of my favourite institutions in Mitte (mainly facilitated by the fact I had discovered it in my first year in Berlin and it has remained literally unaltered since). The café is one of the nicer, more accessible and less pretentious spaces one can still find in Mitte, with nice cake, good coffee, and pleasingly appealing ambiance. The furniture is dark with ornate wooden chairs and random marble tables, all aiming for a second-class vintage feeling. The walls are directly painted on with naff pictures pertaining to various aspects of the European nature, my favourite being a rough brush work of a (blondly European) couple fornicating over a table.

Ever since I discovered it on a dreary February afternoon, I have considered Altes Europa to be more or less the only acceptable option for a caffeine-laden tryst around Mitte. Yet over the years I have constantly failed to sample the café’s culinary end, and strangely enough not for lack of wanting. With lunch and dinner menus changing on daily basis and a selection of intriguing German/local cuisine, I’ve always wanted to check out what Altes Europa had to offer beyond its espresso machine. And so, after years of waiting, one of many coincidences made me find my there way on a Sunday evening last week.

The evening menu was shabbily written on a piece of xeroxed paper handed in to us by the bitter waiter. The selection of dishes was fairly limited, and we started by ordering the only real starter on the menu, which was the Suppe von jungen Karotten mit Sesam und Koriander (carrot soup with sesame and coriander, 3.50 €). A large portion of a fairly delicious luquidy substance with tiny bits of carrots in it, it was both aesthetically pleasing as well as tasty.

We then continued with the Riesen-Pffiferlingsravioli mit Spitzkohlgemüse und Gruyère überbacken (large chanterelle-raviolis, baked with pointed cabbage and gruyere for 7.90 €) and an entrecote (made of what was supposed to be Argentinean meat with avocado paste and rocket salad and sweet-potato mash for 14.50 €). I have to say I did not like the sound of either dish. The baked raviolis sounded like a random “look what I’ve got left in the fridge” ordeal and the avocado paste together with that sweet-potato mash sounded like something that wanted to be pretentious, but fell short of getting anywhere near high brow. The raviolis were what they sounded like: random. They reminded me of the good old “beggars can’t be choosers” days in Berlin, when restaurants came up with the strangest ideas of the most disturbing mixtures that usually tasted the same: two things that didn’t work together (in this case chanterelles and pointed cabbage) strewn with cheese and baked in some random oven. It looked like an alien on a plate. And yet, everything covered by cheese is good, and it’s even better when it’s cheap. The steak was surprisingly far better. The meat was decent, that Northern European version of guacamole was pleasing (don’t even try to compare it to the real thing, but you can’t really whinge too much when you get something made of real, fresh avocados) and the sweet-potato mash was downright delicious. Somehow I ended up not minding that bizarrely mind-boggling combination.

Soup

Alien looking ravioli

The finale was the only dessert on the menu: Mango-yoghurt mousse with pistachios and grilled pineapple (for the price of 3.90 €). Another strange combination, I agree. We’ll start with the fact I absolutely despised gilled fruit. I find it to be a perversion I will never understand. But if you like grilled fruit and large desserts, you will like this one as well. The mousse was more than decent for the price and the pineapple was strangely juicy despite it being grilled.

Entrecote

Mousse

Bottom line: Altes Europa is a really nice place. The uninspiringly random dishes were well executed and the pricing was more than humane. I am not a fan of the menu selection, which would have otherwise left the place with solid three prints, but the pricing and the high quality of its ingredients (not to mention the place’s atmosphere) all convinced me to wiggle out a generous fourth.

Overall mark: 

Café Altes Europa

Gipsstraße 11, 10119 Berlin
Tel: +49 (0)30 2809 3840


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Discovering Mitte

Chén Ché - Mitte

Could you believe I once lived in Mitte? It was over six years ago. Just around the corner from Rosenthaler Platz. Quite a few of the buildings over there had not been renovated yet and I enjoyed the romantic decrepit atmosphere. The flat was adorned with a couple of canon walls from the war, one of which forming a large crater between my room and the bathroom. Yes, it was a dump, but an exciting one of that.

Things happened in Mitte at the time. And by “things” I don’t mean a group of drunken Brits riding on a pedal powered beer bike screaming “blobby-blobby-blobby” or a bunch of Spaniards nonchalantly vomiting with a grin in front of their hostel while mumbling “Berlin, so alternative!” At the time it felt like real people lived in Mitte. Today, I am aware of the fact that some of them still exist, but I don’t know any of them anymore.

Do not get me wrong, I am not lamenting what’s happened over the years to Mitte. I whinge because that is what I do, but the tourist locust infesting Berlin’s geographic centre is not entirely negative. One big difference from the Mitte of yore is that fact things have become more international, worldlier. Six years ago - at a time when everything was still authentic – Berlin also felt more provincial. So it was time to go back to Mitte. To try and follow the zeitgeist and feel cool.

The Vietnamese tea house ChénChè (one of three partnered restaurants in Mitte) felt like the perfect choice for a zeitgeisty venue with its impressive homepage. Otherwise, its choice of location inside an inner courtyard on Rosenthaler Straße could not have proved to be any better. An inner courtyard is both intimate and secretive. Makes you think you’re special. The decor also deserves acclaim. It succeeds in combining the generically horrid Vietnamese/Japanese grand scale restaurant pomp with a touch of good taste and pleasing design. The lightning could use a bit of dimming on the edges, but otherwise it was surprisingly nice. My only disappointment was that the weather did not allow us to sit in the garden, which looked quite charming.

The menu is not overwhelmingly large, which was quite an advantage. Another thing I found quite sweet was the fact that most dishes were presented as vegetarian by default, yet possibly served with meat. From the list of eight possible starters we ordered three: Xôi Gà (sticky coconut rice, shallots, lotus root and chicken breast for 6.20 €), Hoành Thành (baked won-tons which we ordered with spicy tofu filling, 5.80 €) and Cha Giò (baked Vietnamese spring rolls with coriander dressing, ordered with pork filling, 5.80 €). The spring rolls were the only thing that was just alright. Their taste was nice, yet uninspiring and the coriander dip was too lemony to taste of anything else. Yet the other starters were just splendid. The won-tons were strangely crispy with filling that tasted of joy and the Xôi Gà was just perfect. Each of its ingredients had kept a distinct taste that created quite a splendid mix when randomly scooped out together.

Starters

Bùn Riêu

We then continued to the main courses. There are three main courses in the usual menu and three other changing dishes. We went for the Bùn Riêu (vegetable soup with tofu dumplings and rice noodles, 9.40€) and the Reistafel menu (a changing selection of dishes for 8.40 €). The soup was quite good. It was mildly spicy and was nice to eat, but it had a heaviness that felt nearly Central European. The Reistafel came with a number of various elements. It had a small bowl of Phó (Vietnamese chicken broth), which was hearty and good, but again, was so stodgy it reminded me of my grandmother’s Polish cooking. A chicken leg fried in pleasing sweet sauce greeted me from the bamboo hamper, and another dish of chicken in mild and tasty red curry was served in a plate on the other side. And then the obligatory rice and various vegetables. It was all fairly good. Nothing was too inspiring, but it was definitely pleasing. We ended the meal with a surprisingly and quirkily tasty Ché Choi Nuoc (rice balls filled with peanuts and chocolate swimming in coconut-mango sauce, 5.60 €). I usually don’t enjoy Vietnamese desserts too much, but this one was worth every Cent.

Restafel

Dessert

What can I say? The place was worth the trip to Mitte. Not only was it good, but it also provided us with some of the added values of going to the “centre”: It was the posh version of the sort of Vietnamese places you’d find in Kreuzberg. It was slightly pricier, but the difference was justified by a nice ambiance and good quality (which was exceptional in the cases of the starters and the dessert).

Overall mark:

Chen Che - Teehaus

Rosenthaler Straße 13, 10119 Berlin
http://www.chenche-berlin.de


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Fighting Winter Depression Nr. 1: Italian Food and Niceness.

La Galleria Italiana, Mitte

Last month I started the search for the perfect local Italian. With Christmas and the end of the year looming, it started feeling like I needed to make minimal progress – and soon. Overwhelmed by Christmas markets, half-a-meter bratwursts and a foot of snow, I needed a sense of a mission. All the better if it were a mission carrying the scents of lemons and sun instead of darkness and glühwein. It bears all the marks of a large, fat winter depression.

The fact I was seeking solace from the wintery darkness at Italian restaurants was by itself a sign of dangerous Germanisation. Since the beginning of time, Germans have gone to the country south of the Alps in order to feel worldlier, more Mediterranean and more alive. Goethe eternalised his yearnings for Italy’s sun and natural vitamin D3 in “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?” and my old heroin-addict excuse for a flatmate Astrid used to sober up every time the word “Italy” was mentioned, because it made her feel young and carefree all over again.

With the winter wreaking havoc in my natural defences, I was even ready to shed my inbuilt Italophobia and try out a new Italian place. After a long group discussion, we agreed on going to a small and inconspicuous Italian restaurant on Torstraße in Mitte. Located at the less pretentious end of the street (closer to Oranienburger Tor than to Rosenthaler Platz), the small restaurant is strikingly simple, with ochre walls and IKEA-like furniture. A glass counter contained an array of Italian culinary paraphernalia of all shapes and colours, with the usual olives, cheese and sausages. Behind it stood a genuine Italian waiting to taken our orders.

We started with a few serves of the large antipasti misto (a plate with different starters, 13 €, also available in the smaller version for 7 €). It was a perfect serve: a combination of different ingredients from marinated mushrooms and carrots through salad, cheese and ham. They were all delicious and fresh, with a perfect balance between the various bits. The size was also very pleasing. One serving was more than enough for two persons. The joy was completed by a bottle of cheap, yet surprisingly nice montepulciano (for a mere price of 12€ - not a bad deal).

Antipasti

Spaghetti Marinara

The main courses arrived promptly thereafter. Four of us had pasta: Spaghetti marinara (seafood spaghetti in tomato sauce, 8 €), spaghetti salsiccia e pomodorinni (spaghetti with Italian sausage, cherry tomatos and balsamico based sauce, 7 €), tagliatelle cantarelli (tagliatelle with chanterelles, bacon and truffle oil, 8.50 €) and the daily tagliatelle with pork filet (8.50 € as well). The last one opted for the entrecôte al Barolo (entrecôte with balsamico sauce and potatoes, 14.50 €). The quality of the pasta varied from absolutely fantastic (the tagliatelle cantarelli: perfect balance between the different flavours, with mushrooms, bacon fat and truffle all getting their perfect fifteen seconds of glory) through very good (the salsiccia, which was a very good dish despite or maybe even because of its inherent simplicity) and to disappointing despite being nice (the pork filet, which was nice, but lacked the great quality of the others and the marinara, which had a very good tomato sauce, but had a meagre seafood presence with relatively dry calamari and a slight touch of shrimps). The pasta itself was fresh and homemade in all cases. The entrecôte was more of an escalope than a steak (it was very thin), but that is to be expected at an Italian restaurant. At the same time, please don’t take this as a complaint: it was a perfect escalope: good quality, tender meat in a savoury, brown sauce. There were no desserts on the menu, but the waitress did tell us there was panna cotta, which I then ordered (4.50 €) and was not disappointed. It was the best one I have had in a long time: good texture, not too sweet and with the perfect berry-sauce.

Entrecôte

Panna Cotta

As we indented to pay, we realised, once again, what it meant to be dining at an “authentic” Italian restaurant. The waitress was not prepared for the German task of separating the bill. She tried to remain nice, as her basic skills of addition and subtraction were stretched to their limit. Her utter incompetence in the realm of maths would have been a true infliction at any Teutonic context, but she managed to pull it off with an endearing smile and offer everyone ramazotti on the house. True, ramazotti is not exactly my cup of tea, but when it’s on the house I manage to turn a blind eye to my other principles.

As La Galleria Italiana managed to please even hardcore Italophobes such as myself, I could only advise other people to go try it out. It’s good, affordable and pleasing. Good enough to earn four prints.

Overall mark: 

 

La Galleria Italiana

Torstraße 182, 10115 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0) 30 27 57 29 48


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Vampire Francophilia

Nord-Sud

At the end of the 21st Century, even vampires seem to have realised French restaurants were a girl’s best friend. Just before True Blood’s Vampire Bill’s ludicrous proposition to Sookie in a splendidly romantic French restaurant, he justifies his choice of venue by the fact “humans love French restaurants”. As much as I dislike Vampire Bill, he has a point. Not only do humans love French restaurants, but posh humans seem to like them even more. French restaurants are the quintessential definition of expensive poshness. That is, until one actually finds their way into a French restaurant in France.

Yes, of course, there are quite a few awfully posh French restaurants in France. No doubt about it. Yet at the end of the day, the very institution of going out to dine at a restaurant is a lot more accessibly down-to-earth in the Republic of the Rights of Man, frogs and snails. Therefore, most restaurants are actually quite simple and they often are a lot more affordable than their counterparts in – let’s say – that island just across the canal.

As we all know, Berlin is quite an affordable place, but French restaurants are still a taboo when it comes to design, taste and affordability. They are usually there for Francophiles with the required taste and the money to support it. Yet no more! A few years ago, an alternative opened its gates in the most implausible place of all: on Augustrstraße in the very heart of Mitte. It is called Nord-Sud and it is run by the short, ginger Jean-Claude, a chti (that’s how you call people from the North of France) playing on people’s desire to get a “true French experience”.


You see, the deco is not entirely endearing. We’re talking about large wooden tables and simple chairs. Quite IKEA-like, yet very welcoming. The place exudes accommodating, nearly studenty simplicity. The owner-waiter runs around and tries talking to people in French. People who come there usually also want to speak back in French and to bathe in the sense of being in a true French place. The food concept contributes to that overall feeling: there is no real menu. Every day there are three set menus composed of a starter, a main course and a desert, an entire menu for 7.50 €.

We were a group of three and were therefore able to cover all the menus. At first we just ordered a bottle of Merlot (for the price of 17.50 € - definitely quite affordable. The problem was the water. The only non-French custom Nord-Sud has allowed itself to copy from the Germans was not serving tap water. In France tap water is actually a human right. But then again, we are in Germany, so we’re used to it). The first menu was a potato soup, émincé de dinde (sliced turkey in mustard sauce and potatoes) and a cherry cake. The second menu consisted of a pâté de campagne, two merguez sausages with couscous and ratatouille and a rhubarb cake. The third menu was a fish menu, with a fish terrine, rosefish filet with spinach and a cheese plate.

Fish Terrine

Paté de Campagne

Now, assessing a set menu for 7.50 € means you know the restaurant will have to cut corners somewhere. In this case I reckoned it would be better to cut on size than on quality, and was therefore not overwhelmed by the small portions. The soup was unspectacularly nice. Both pâtés were good, yet miniscule. The good thing was that we got an interminable supply of baguettes. The main courses were better. The turkey was drop-dead fantastic, and its size was quite pleasing. The sauce was splendid and the small, round potatoes appealed to my baby-hating friend Alisa’s motherly instincts. The merguez were a simple course, but still very good. Not to mention the fact it’s hard to get good merguez around here. The fish was a bit of a disappointment. It was a miniscule portion and the actual fish could have been better. But then again, the sauce was very good and the baguettes compensated for the otherwise small portion. The desserts were quite good as well. Both cakes were small and amusing, but not grand. The cheese plate was tiny, but its superb quality compensated for the initial size-related disappointment.

Merguez

Turkey

All in all, Nord-Sud is one of Mitte’s most amusing places. It’s probably not the place posh-humans would choose in order to propose to their girlfriends, but it will do for an affordable and amusing experience of what real France tends to be like.

Overall mark:

Nord-Sud

Auguststr. 87, 10117 Berlin (Mitte) 
Tel: +49 30 97005928


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