Omnia Mutantur

Since Berliner Republik is kind of high end, even if cheap by european standards, I’d like to list a few examples of really cheap, really good places to eat around town.

At Dada Falafel you can get the best falafel im brot (pide bread) ever for 3 euros. Add 2.5 euros more and you get eastern tea with cinnamon and cardamomo and dessert.

At Maximilian’s in Rosenthaler Platz you can get some very good dönner for 2 euros, and a dürum dönner – which he prepares by wrapping it in Turkish pizza instead of taboon bread – for 2.5 euros. They have falafel, but it’s warmed over and can’t hold a candle to either Dada Falafel’s – stick to their dönner.

Not too far is 5 Flavor, an excellent chinese restaurant. At lunch time you can get one of their many dishes accompanied by either hot-sour soup or a spring roll for 5 euros. I got some very spicy Kung Fu Beef with rice and the hot-sour soup – both were excellent.

Really close too is St. Oberholz, a very chic café with free wireless where 5.5 euros will buy you a cappuccino and one of their very large bowls of soup. If you’re still hungry, a few more euros will get you one of their fine prosciutto sandwiches.

Near the Heinrich-Heine Strasse subway station there’s another middle eastern place. They have a good dönner for 2.5 euros, and some decent falafel which they’ll prepare on the spot.

The café at the Bode Museum has some excellent pastries, even if their coffees are a bit on the expensive side. Still, you can easily get away with a cappuccino and some delicious Mozart Cake for about 7 euros.

There are also many oriental food stalls for eating on the go, for instance a vietnamese place right outside Friedrichstrasse Station, where you can get a box of noodles with vegetables for about 2 euros. This will only be a snack, but it’ll hold you until you find a nice dönner place.

On sundays you can gorge yourself at one of the many brunches around town, which will range from 10 to 15 euros for all you can eat of exquisite food. And of course on any random day you’ll find sausage stands, hot dog vendors and pretzels all over the place, ranging from about 75 cents to 1.5 euros.

This probably paints a better picture of what I mean when I say eating out here is cheap. It’s really, really cheap.

Ricardo Restaurants and bars, Travel Berlin, food

After tasting Berlin’s smorgasboard of Croatian, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Japanese, Indian, Turkish, Russian, Vietnamese and Indian food, I realized I hadn’t had nearly enough German cuisine. I ended up at Berliner Republik, which had been recommended by someone here. They have an interesting system where the beer prices go up and down like a stock market, depending on demand, and every so often the market crashes and prices reset.

I asked the waitress to recommend something to me, and she brought this monstrosity.

There’s sour cabbage on the other side of it, and mashed sweet potatoes as well. It was such a hun thing to serve that they probably expected me to clean my teeth with the bone.

Dessert was very good, some sort of sweet flan with sour grapes and apple slices.

I had two beers (including a rice beer that had a vanilla twang to it), a cappuccino that was a pretty much an espresso with foam on it, the dessert and the huge pork leg. Ended up paying 25 Euros, including their outrageous VAT.

Don’t let anyone tell you that eating out in Berlin is expensive.

Ricardo Restaurants and bars, Travel Berlin, food, Travel

While off on Berlinerstrasse today looking for an asian supermarket, I found a small restaurant advertising itself as specializing in croatian food. I’d never had croatian food, and I was unlikely to be in the area again (nothing to see there), so I dove right in even though I’d planned to start eating lighter and go for some falafel. The croatian lady there did not speak English, but we managed with my smattering of German and a lot of grunting, menu pointing and chest pounding.

That’s the wiesse bohnensuppe, a soup with large white beans that was very good, and came with an excellent bread. The main course was called räuberplatte, which apparently translates to robber’s plate (In Sprachtools we Trust).

That’s three sausages, a lot of pork, some french fries, rice and chopped onions. Yes, the onion on top is on fire. And of course, the inevitable half-liter of local beer.

It was very good overall, if a bit heavy, and an indecently large amount of food for 16 euros. It actually reminded me a lot of Romanian cuisine, in that they share the same we’re-going-to-kill-you-of-a-heart-attack approach to nutrition. I remember now my mom mentioned that her serb uncle uses to prepare something similar to the Romanian sarmale, and the two countries are pretty close, so I wonder how much culinary cross-pollination there was.

That’s it right there – Adria Grill, Berlinerstrasse 141.

Ricardo Restaurants and bars, Travel Berlin, food

Movies be damned, it seems I’m here mostly to do culinary tourism (which is a very fancy way of saying Ricardo’s eating himself into either the poorhouse or an early grave), I’ve had the Brauhaus Lemke recommended on the Rough Guide To Berlin. The Guide seems to know only of the one in Charlottenburgh, which is way on the other side of town, but fortunately I decided to Scroogle before going – they have not only a website but a spanking new location in Hackescher Markt, not only closer to where I am but in an area I wanted to check out.

Mind the location of the photos, by the way, it’s not exactly within Hackescher Markt but a bit to the site.

The online menu looks very appealing, but when I got there they had a buffet lunch for 6.8 euros – very good goulash, vegetable soup, cheeses, paella (which was more arroz con mariscos than anything else), and some mushrooms in cream, as well as desserts. The start of the day were the beers:

I had the house beer (above) and a wheat beer. The latter was good but not impressive, and very close to an Oettinger (OK, so it was good beer, and I’m fucking spoiled); but the house beer really impressed me.

Good strong flavor without being overpowering – kind of like a middle ground between an Oettinger and a Guinness. Can’t wait to go back.

But since en la variedad está el gusto, I stopped by Lindenbräu at the Sony Center today after picking up my Berlinale tickets for the next few days. It’s a pretty good place, with an excellent goulash and a wheat house beer that is a bit better than Lemke’s wheat beer, even if it lags significatly behind Lemke’s own house brew. Also, while very nicely furnished, it had more of a mall feel, but I guess that’s to be expected of the area.

I guess I should start finding things other than drinking and eating to keep me entertained. Fortunately I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to do tomorrow night.

Ricardo Restaurants and bars, Travel beer, Berlin, food

I should say more about Tadschikische Teestube, the russian tea room I had dinner at last Monday.

It’s located in the Unter der Linden area inside the Theater im Palais, a small but opulent theater. The lady I’m renting the place from had recommended it, as did the Rough Guide to Berlin. I spent some time walking around the area, unable to find an entrance – it’s neither on Dorotheenstrasse nor on Unter den Liden, but on a little side street that’s not evident on the guide’s maps (but is on Google Maps, Which Know All).

Once you come in, you’re greeted by the luxurious theater lobby.

On the second floor to the right you’ll see a clump of coats and shoes. That’s the teahouse.

Why shoes? Well, the inside is covered in rugs, so you can sit on the floor and eat from very low tables if you wish. All rug tables were taken when I arrived, so I sat myself in a regular table to admire the warm environment and oriental rugs draped on the walls.

They have many types of tea, including pushkin with vodka. Having been walking for 8 hours (literally) in the freezing cold, I decided that some whisky was necessary and ordered Irish tea.

Even if you calibrate for the fact that that the time merely hot water would have been great, it was delicious – the tea was just soft enough, but still blended perfectly with the whisky.

I got in trouble when ordering food, however – the menu was only in russian and german, the russian owner didn’t speak any English, and this was my first time having Russian food. Fortunately a very nice Peruvian fellow who is in germany studying Mechanical Engineering was working there part time, and he gave me some suggestions. I ended up having some russian borschtsch (the traditional one, with beetroot) for entree:

And Pelmeni for the main course.

This is sort of a lamb-filled ravioli, and reminded me of a dish that Mehmet prepares at Aya Sofya. The taste of the Pelmeni was very interesting – a strong taste for the meat, with a very light, refreshing flavor for the pasta. The salad, all too often merely something to fill the plate, was a perfect complement – the carrots were unexpectedly sweet, and a very good contrast to the somewhat acidic greens.

At this point I was stuffed, even after having walked all day, but I had to try the desserts. I told them to surprise me, and this arrived.

The bill calls it bliny preiselbeeren, and preiselbeeren means lingonberries. The photographs do not do it justice. It was once again a very contrasting dish – the acidic berries at the center are on top of sweet cold whipped cream, which is itself on top of some sort of warm tortilla. This by itself would have been enough, but the dish is perfectly rounded up by the very fresh fruits on the outside, such bananas, strawberries and kiwi.

The final bill was 6.8 euro for the tea, 3.2 euro for the Borsch, 7.5 for the Pelmeni and 5.4 for the bliny preiselbeeren – not pocket change, but not exactly expensive either. For those keeping score at home, it’s a total of 22.9 euros, or about 16,000 colones – around what you would pay at an upscale place like Saga for a 3-course meal, and that’s before you factor in the Irish tea, that it includes a high 19% VAT, and that you keep hearing how expensive good food is in Europe (more on that topic later).

In short, loved it, and I’m looking forward to repeat the experience, even if it does mean that it’ll spoil me for other places (and that eventually I’ll have to head back out into the cold).

Ricardo Restaurants and bars, Travel Berlin, food, tea

Here’s a brilliant conference by Hans Rosling on how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. Besides being the most sui generis and amusing talk on economics I’ve ever seen, he presents viscerally the difference an extra $10 per day on income can have in the quality of life.

I was surprised that he didn’t point out that, on his presentation, the listed means for development are almost opposite in importance to the goals, which could indicate why attempting to follow the same path once you’ve reached development leads only to stagnation.

Using his Gapminder tool, checked Costa Rica’s progress on GDP (graph after the text). Even knowing the effects that the Carazo administration had on our country, it was still shocking to see on the chart how far backwards we had ended up in terms of GDP.

Presenters, take notice: that’s how you give a talk on a dry subject.

Read more…

Ricardo Costa Rica, Math and economics, Restaurants and bars

I first met Ernesto over 10 years ago, when he was running a tiny mexican food business out of an even tinier garage. He called the place Huaraches, after the mexican dish. It was impossible not to get caught up in his great attitude and fun demeanor – the fact that the food was exquisite was the icing on the cake.

Over the years, I saw Neto’s business grow while maintaining the great quality and service it was known for. He moved across the street from the small garage, into a house he rebuilt out of his own pocket, working hard to avoid even having to go to a bank for a loan; and eventually expanded to open restaurants in Costa Rica.

Since life has a penchant for moving the rug from under you, Neto is starting from scratch with a small restaurant called Tá … Kanhijo, 100 meters north of Atlas in Heredia, right next door to the Hooligan’s bar. His warm, personal service, his great hand for food and delicious salsas are all there; and as if that wasn’t enough, from Wednesday to Saturday it’s open until 2am.

My family was there last Sunday, and everyone was glad to see him in his usual high spirits, his magic touch for making you feel right at home still there. When my dad asked him if he was doing well, he replied

That’s the sort of attitude that’ll get you anywhere you want to be.

PS: I understand that you can get home delivery by calling 263-6982, but I’m guessing it’s only in the Heredia area.

Ricardo Costa Rica, Restaurants and bars

It always gives me the same warm feeling of drinking a glass of Hennessy on a rainy afternoon when, instead of just saying it would be good to have so and so, one of my friends actually does something about it.

Dan started JiffyBill as a pet project, to help us distribute the charges for our decadent lunches, where inevitably we end up too satiated with food and wine to have the presence of mind to split in situ, so somebody ends up picking up the tab and has then to bill the rest.

After a few of these, however, the trail of I-owe-you-but-you-owed-me-from-before can get convoluted, so he created JiffyBill (back then it was called LunchBill) to help us get things straight (cuentas claras, chocolate espeso we say around here). While I liked the name LunchBill a lot more – you could just tell somebody to lunchbill you – we started using it to send each other bills for anything from movie tickets to loans to shopping to … er … (ahem!) adult entertainment (ahem!), so it was renamed.

We’ve been testing it for a while internally, and the baby seems to be ready now to go out into the world. Take it for a spin, give it a beating, and let us know how you like it.

Ricardo Restaurants and bars, Science and Technology

So it was Tatiana’s birthday on Thursday, and a group of friends attended her summons to a place in Tres Ríos called either Café Arte or Taller del Artista (depending on which sign you read). I was going to write a full review for Barflies, but I thought that a warning would suffice.

Their only saving grace is a wide selection of coffees, but food and art they have are quite similar: unimaginative, shallow, bland and overpriced.

No compelling reason to go, unless you want to gawk at Rafa Fernández knock-offs while being “attended to” by snotty waitresses.

Ricardo Restaurants and bars