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.

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So I got invited to C-Base last night for their annual Space Meal.

Perhaps I should back up a bit.

C-Base is a space station which once moved accidentally through time and ended up crashing in Berlin. The station laid buried for aeons until it was discovered by germans. It has since begun rebuilding itself, a lot of which takes place by rewriting and adapting people’s memories. A good example might be the Fernsehturm Berlin, which is actually the space station’s antenna, and the station then rewrote the memories of GDR officials to make them believe it was a tower they had constructed.

The antenna may also have been discovered by GDR officials who then claimed it was their intention to build a tower there all along – the accounts are uncertain.

The Space Meal is an annual even where space travelers gather to share either the food of their homeworlds, or interesting items they have found in their travels. They’re asked to come in the traditional garb of their home planet. The food is then judged in three criteria:

• Look
• Taste
• Background
• Suitability for a zero-G environment

There. Hopefully that cleared things up.

It was a lot of fun. I knew I was in the right place when I was greeted by this:

Not to mention…

Unfortunately that’s only a hollow shell and has been filled with a PC running Linux.

I was greeted by Hein-C and Nadine, who kindly gave me a tour of this part of the station, which includes public areas, member-only areas, electronic workshops, and more hardware that you could shake a fistful of smartdust at, as well as some peculiar decor.

It seems the Space Meal is usually held in September, but they moved it to February by reasons I could not discern. I had originally planned to come in September to Berlin, but decided to move it to coincide with the Berlinale. It was quickly determined this was another instance of the station rewriting reality – clearly it was September, or both my trip and the space meal wouldn’t be taking place.

Nadine also translated one of the stories for me.

This fellow’s story is that his culture uses those flat bread tablets as books, to transfer knowledge. This leads to knowledge being unreliably transmitted, since scribes will sometimes eat the writing device as they’re working. There are many types of cookies used for writing, which lead to a discussion on taste (both literally and literary).

Fortunately, there was someone on hand to check out that the food was safe for consumption by carbon-based life forms.

Don’t ask me what these were – some type of mint drink mixed with a sweet milky substance and something like pepper. And small shiny edible beads.

There were two other dishes, but I understand that the winners were the blue rolls on the right:

They were a sort of blue sushi filled with blueberry jam from some galaxy far, far away. Interesting choice, and it won on most of the categories. I would have asked more questions, but after 2 liters of various beers I’m not sure I would have remembered the answers. Contestants were then decked out in commemoratory aprons.

That’s Hein-C in the kilt. I ended up staying there until about 2:20am, at which time I decided I’d better start finding a subway before I crashed (the Club Mate was starting to wear off), but this has got to be the single most unique experience of the trip so far.

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You’d probably like this, Jorge.

It’s a carbonated mate drink. Very refreshing, although the taste might be a bit on the light side.

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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.

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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