I left Berlin thinking how everything was physically larger. Perhaps the city architects mistook their metric scales for imperial ones. The repeated pattern which cover the major central train stations went on forever and they make St Pancras feel more like Covent Garden. The behemoth of trains which pass through were like one of those in an Elliot Erwitt photograph. Throbbing engines, brushed metal armoured hulls complete, smelly leather seats so large it made me feel like a midget. And that is after negotiated a gap large enough for me to fall through. As I made my way around the city, I couldn’t help but remind myself of Berlin’s history. It was a strange feeling, as if the city had absorbed the decades past into it’s character, especially at Checkpoint Charlie. Once the border security which moderated human traffic in and out of East and West Berlin. Yet at the same time, the city felt young, in that the glass encrusted urban jungle of new Berlin was visibly building itself on top of the auld one.

We had left for Berlin on the weekend of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, we just missed all the fireworks. I’m terrible with planning trips but luckily the better half had done most (if not all) of the hardwork and managed a nifty setup in Leonardo Hotel which was only into it’s third month of operations at that time. Yes that’s right, even the hotel rooms in Berlin were bigger than usual. It’s a hotel I would recommend since there is a currywurst seller just opposite the restaurant and which seems apt to kick off my little report on Berlin food.

Currywurst – probably Germany’s most popular ‘streetfood’.There were currywursts vendors on most street corners and usually could be had for a euro or two. It is common practice to serve sausages diced and bun-free in Germany. With currywurst, the speciality is the sweet curry ketchup sauce smothered on the sausage with generous lashing of curry powder.

It’s an efficient recipe, one that I really enjoy and just about as good as I remembered it when I was in Hamburg. The sweetness of the ketchup, the aroma of the curry powder and then the seasoned saltiness of the bouncy sausages. I think German sausages are great for their consistent texture and usually rich but pure flavour – of course I am generalising here, but I’ve never had a bad German Wurst, it is their national dish afterall. We ordered some bread rolls and chips as well – the latter of which was crunchy and nutty. Maybe it’s got something to do with German potatoes, but I think German chips taste better than they do over here. We would return to Eckherts’ Currywurst shop several times again throughout this trip to top-up, and that’s not counting the sausages we devoured at the farmer’s market near our hotel as well. Mmmm….. currywurst…

A bellyful of wurst later, what we really need then is a cup of coffee. Walking around the city, we noticed the distinct absence of that American franchise with the green logo. Instead we noted a boxy brown logo virtually at all the major U-bahn stations. It bore the name of one of the more famous Germans in history : Einstein Coffee

So we decided to give it a whirl, twice actually, and it certainly felt like a franchise. I wouldn’t say it was the best coffee I had this side of Europe, but the much more euro-centric setting was alot more appealing than a tired Starbucks.

This photograph is a bit redundant because I’m not entirely sure what to say about it. Except that it’s something which caught my eye while I was in the cafe, especially the red from the coffee machine, it’s just so vibrant. It is a blog post at the end of the day I suppose, yes welcome to my brain.

As the day turned to night, the girls came out to play.

We hit town hoping to soak in abit of that famed German party animal spirit, only to find a relatively sober entertainment district. This is abit of an after fact, apparently we ‘hit town’ a tad too early, as the party doesn’t really start till 3am in the morning. Anyway, I couldn’t wait that long for dinner in any case.

One of the first culinary destinations was Cafe Noe.

It was a cosy little wine bar – there was a wide variety of single glasses including personal favourites Spat Burgunder. Their bite-size only menu seemed more Alsatian than German, baguettes with sliced cheese and fig mustard, duck terrine and French snails. We opted for the most substantial items on the menu including a ‘flammekueche’ as well as ‘blutwurstcanapes’.

This would be my first experience of the tarte flambée which is basically a razor thin pizza base – a recipe from Alsace. A swift trip to Wiki explains that the tarte flambee was created as a way to test wood-fired ovens as the peak temperature of the oven would bake the perfect tarte flambee – A crusty border just burnt by the flames of the fired oven. We ordered toppings of coppa di Parma, sour cream and rocket (9.50 euros). Now, I’m not really the pizza connoisseur as I’ve not actually been to Italy to try an ‘authentic’ pizza (or Alsace in this case), though I enjoyed the squidgy thin base as well as the very smokey charcoaled edges. Even better I thought, were the blutwurstcanape – German black pudding chopped and then made into a sort of bruschetta. It’s more pleasant than a fry up I have to say, it’s more fragrant and alot lighter in flavour.

We are back in Bismarckstraße again, and next door from the currywurst place is a sort of foodhall and supermarket called Rogacki.

Initially I was hesistant to eat here because I wanted to sit down for a meal. The only chairs I saw were for the tables outside the establishment. Inside, it was a green-tiled mess hall with standing tables, no chairs.

Needless to say, the place was packed out. Lots of Germans who didnt speak English. We chose a seafood bar which was seemingly the centrepiece of the hall. Initially we struggled with ordering and in the end resorted to pointing at random menu items when we became ravenous. How could one not feel one’s stomach rumble with the fresh fish sizzling in front of us right?

Here we go, a selection of shellfish, pickled vegetables and parsley for decoration. Sweet, succulent and fulfilling.

The missus opted for a warming fish soup – large chunks of seafood and a glass of zingy german house white.

Touring the foodhall, I feel a little regretful that I didnt attempt to load my suitcase with a small sampling of the smoked fish on offer at Rogacki, ah well, guess I’ll have to visit Berlin again in the near future.

Finally then, one of the last restaurants we hit was Restaurant Oderquelle. You’ll forgive my shallow knowledge of Berlin’s best, so we turned to the interwebs which led us to discover Oderquelle and its good reputation among it’s online patrons.

They specialised in German-Euro Fusion, though honestly I wouldn’t be able to tell. The menu was brief and I chose to order the most exotic items I saw. First up was a hand wash cheese.

Very interesting stuff, the cheese was translucent in appearance and it looked more like a piece of fish than cheese. It didn’t taste much like a dairy product either; It was smoked and seasoned, with a scallop-like flavour. Spring onion garnishings and doused with an weird watery and oily sauce that mixed, very fishy.

For my main, Rump steak with roasted pumpkins, rocket leaves and a cauliflower creamed potato salad. The steak was beautifully rare and needed to be since this was a chunky rump. Good beefy flavours though the real star of the dish was the garnishings – toasty pumpkin sweetness, peppery as it went down. Rustic.

Well, that’s my brief account of my excursions to Europe to expand my culinary palate. I think I barely scratched the surface of gastronomy in Berlin, and Germany for that matter what with this weekend being more of a snapshot more than anything. It’s an interesting destination which doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and for the most part, the people in Berlin treat tourists with respect and we walked away with an impression that people are generally friendly. Wunderbar.

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I moan about the speed of my broadband alot. It’s one of these do everything type packages where by the phone line that permits me to connect to the world wide web also serves as a carrier for the TV signal. It’s an incessant system. It gets clogged up very easily during peak hours and hardly ever reaches it’s advertised potential of 8MB, it’s more like 3; 4 when it’s really sunny outside. In this age of want on demand, life could not be slower. Ironic then, I think of my endearing Tiscali box as I sit here in sunny Brunei, in a vain attempt to write an update to this blog by working with a relic from an age long since passed : the 56k modem. I’m not entirely sure of the model, since it’s an internal PCI (are they even called that?) card which is installed on my dad’s machine, which is also an item lined up to be a future artifact in an Electronics museum (if such a place exists). I remember the day when I first introduced myself to the internet. Oh man it was hard. I held my breath every time I dialed up, hoping for a ringing tone, as if I was calling a potential love interest, but more often than not, I was to be disappointed on many occasions with the familiar engaged tone. My disappointment however, had only served to solidify my resolve, as I soldiered on with the redialing again, and again, and then again. I developed techniques to deal with the soul destroying wait for a ringing tone; I chose to dial during lunchtime when I assumed most people were away from their PCs; I would also superstitiously hang up after the third engaged tone, as it seemed to lead to a ringing tone after…. seemed to. When I got in, there was always, a pause before the ringing began. My pulse quickens, my eyeballs become enlarged. The moment finally upon us ……. and then a whirring and wailing as if the ghost in the machine was issuing an awakening call before calming down to a chattering buzz and the words on the dial-up window changed.


“ You are connected “

Wow… magic. Netscape 3.0, now we wait.

Flash forward to 2009, and I am sitting in a mall somewhere in Berlin. I am pretty sure it was one of the newly built malls in the Potsdamer Platz area, but I could be wrong. I was searching for the Leica shop in Berlin, so I turned on the wi-fi and then google maps on my iPhone – amazing speed. The load time was near enough non-existent. We have come so far in the last decade or so with communications, information has never flowed like it has today, granted we experience abit of an overload now and again, but working with my Dad’s 56kps modem has certainly brought me a sense of appreciation that we can now choose to live in the luxury of the fast lane. Anyway, we had walked by Lutter & Wegner which was just outside the mall and were instantly delighted with the interior design. The walls literally lined with bottles of wine, it had a very attractive quality which was much like a fantasy of mine to eat while being surrounded by alcohol. I resisted my instinct to reach in break open multiple bottles of champagne to pour over my head – that remained a fantasy. We didn’t go in that night as we had already ate, instead we returned the day after for a spot of German lunch.

These guys don’t seem to yet have an english website, so I had to google translate their history. Turns out, Lutter & Wegner are old of the oldest names in wine in Germany and there are several branches found across Berlin, Hamburg and elsewhere. This particular branch I went to was built in 1912, in WeinHaus Huth in Potsdamer Platz, next to the Grand Hotel Esplanade – which as is explained on their website – thanks to solid steel foundations, was one of the few standing structures that survived the War through to the reunification. That’s about as much as I know regarding their history post-visit; while we were there, we were simply mesmerized tourists.

We arrived twelve sharp, service was only just starting and we were the restaurant’s first patrons. The first thing we noted was the warm service. The first waitress couldn’t speak much English, and my German was gibberish anyway, but yet, she chose to break the language barrier to accommodate us, which I really appreciated. The menu was written in German, so another waitress who spoke better English came over to explain things to us. I’m not an expert of German cuisine even with my brief but intense introduction to it while I was in Hamburg, so this was all very new and exciting to me, especially a place that seemed to have gathered a rich culture and history. They even have their own wines. While my dad swears by German rieslings, I’m a huge ‘Spatburgunder’ fan. It is basically German Burgundy (which doesnt make much sense in itself.. it’s like saying German Paris..) and the reds are made from a variant of the ever popular and delicate Pinot Noir grape. I particularly enjoy the Sparburgunder style because it’s brighter, jammier, lighter and more acidic that the soily and mineral character that is associated with Burgundies.

Let’s start shall we: Potato soup ‘Berlin Style’ with Fresh Marjoram.

The greatest impression German food has left with me is the utterly wholesome aromas. I thought this soup was representative of all the best qualities of German food, thick, grainy, rich with a sharp and salty burn – just potato puree heaven. All potato soups should be made like this. On the other side of the table, the special half was taking in a simple consomme – sweet fragrance and almost like a warm date flavoured wine.

On to the mains. We had noted there were a couple of award winners on their menu, not entirely sure what committee had decided it was the best of crop, but as it was the restaurants’ golden crop, we had to order it : Sauerbraten.

The brown sauce is sweet, almost plum-like, I thought it was just a tad too sharp, but I was also mindful of its hearty style. The beef itself was tender and verging on mushy, I suppose the texture fitted in with my impression of a ‘real’ German style roast, and so I was quite happy with it. The mash was out of this world good, lumpy but crazy rich in butter and the superbly potatoey. I wonder if the quality of potatoes played a part in both this mash and the soup before it. Two types of Krauts accompanied the beef: The yellow coloured ones were aromatic, the red ones were just tart, acidic and strong. woah. Overall, I liked it. I wouldn’t say this was the greatest award-winning thing I had ever had, plus I hadn’t ever tried the competition before either, but coming from a purely noob standpoint, this dish fulfilled expectations, it tasted like what I thought German food tastes like.

We ordered another beef dish, this one was boiled, doused with a cauliflower sauce.

This dish also exuded hearty aromas, however it disappointed as that cauliflower sauce was overly salty, and I found myself trying to scrape it off. Perhaps the heavy seasoning is to accommodate the amazingly drab boiled meat – it was tasteless. Topped off with shaven horseradish and boiled potatoes, carrots and radishes – I thought this entirely blanched dish had had boiling water strip it of too much natural flavours. I didn’t like it because there was a clash of extremes : Bland beef and salty sauce.

On the whole though, my Lutter and Wegner experience was positive. As a tourist, I felt fulfilled and I mean, the wine encrusted space is an attractive idea that really gave way to a comfortable lunch. A word of warning though, this place ain’t cheap, starters around 15 euros, mains around 30 euros. However, you do get what you paid for, most of all, that spatburgunder was a cracker, I would gladly go back again to sip wine and then take in some soup and bread.

Meanwhile, where in the world is Kang?

Hope you enjoyed this one folks, oh I should probably let you know that I’m actually on my annual leave right now, I will resume my London Eating duties on the third week of February, as I am currently feet up in the sandy beaches of Brunei, and then moving on to the urban jungle of Singapore and then finally sneaking the decisive moment on the streets of Taipei. There will be more more Berlin fillers and some stories from the Far East for the next couple of weeks, and while my routine may become abit erratic, I will make time to keep you entertained.

The Gist of It

Lutter & Wegner official site 40 euros pp
Alte Potsdamer Strasse 5D – 10785 Berlin
Tel : +49 30 -25 29 43 50
Email : info@l-w-berlin.de

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