Berlin on a Platter

Casalot

On Mother's Day morning, my husband and I were trying to think of a place to go for brunch. We didn't feel like going to our usual haunts and were stumped on what to try. "I know," he said. "Search for an Arab restaurant serving brunch."

So I, uh, did just that: googled "Arab restaurant", "brunch" and "Berlin". The first result that popped up was Casalot, in Mitte, just around the corner from Friedrichstrasse. Whatever, I thought to myself. This is going to end badly. Who googles what I did and actually gets a winner?

Last laugh is on me, because, oh my goodness, Casalot was a total revelation.

It's a pretty spacious place, with both indoor and outdoor seating. When we arrived, the seats outdoors were all empty. Gah, I thought, figuring this was proof that we'd made a bad choice. But inside, the tables were packed. We got the last table (that we had reserved, which I recommend you do, too).

The buffet was set up in the front room where the bar is. There was a long table filled with big platters of cold salads, a table of hot chafing dishes and a dessert table. The selection of cold salads alone was wonderful - there were the usual suspects like hummus, labneh and baba ghannoush, but also many other things like fennel and tomato salad, a cooked tomato salad that was spicy and bright, flash-fried vegetable salad, artichokes, olives, and on and on. As our meal progressed, I realized that cooks were bringing out new salads to the serving table all the time, not just replenishing what was already there. Everything was impeccably fresh and perfectly seasoned. This was really, really good food. (The price per head is €12,90, which is a lot more than other Berlin brunch spots, but the excellent food more than justifies the cost.)

After we'd eaten our fill of the cold salads, we moved on to the chafing dishes, which held, among other things, lovely little mint-flecked lamb meatballs and roast chicken that was incredibly moist and flavorful. (Actually, I'm not really sure how it was prepared - but it was out-of-this-world. Even Hugo couldn't stop eating it).

The dessert table was full of fruit and little Arab pastries - date-stuffed, sesame-studded, rose-water flavored, you get the drill. I can't speak to any of those, because of this, but honestly, at that point, dessert would have been too much for me anyway. (Actually, that reminds me that although I didn't eat any of the bread, it looked sort of average - they're not making their own, as far as I can tell, which is a shame since the food is so good. But there you have it.)

On one run to the buffet, I ran into a chef sliding a new platter on the table, so I told him how delicious everything was and I asked him what kind of Arab restaurant Casalot is. My father and Max and I had spent the entire lunch wondering if the cooks were Moroccans or Lebanese or Tunisians or Palestinians or what. And actually, it turns out that we were all right. The chef told me that Casalot is the old Roman name for the Palestinian town his boss is from. But the cooks are from all over the place: Tunisia, Morocco and Lebanon, among many other places.

There are a lot of cooks in Casalot's kitchen and thank goodness for that, because what they're doing is delicious. I can't wait to go back.

Casalot
Claire-Waldoff-Strasse 5
10117 Berlin
(030) 275 72 210

Coledampf's & Companies im Aufbau Haus

I've been meaning to tell you about the amazing lunch I had a few months ago at Coledampf's in the Aufbau Haus in Kreuzberg. The restaurant is just beyond a little café area at the front of the house. It's all industrial-chic and so forth, with mismatched chairs, long tables, an open kitchen and a gleaming array of pots and pans arranged for sale around the dining tables. (But I was sorry to see that the amazing selection of cookbooks that once were housed in the store have been greatly reduced to just one little corner.)

The menu is pretty short, or tightly edited as we now say. Which is just fine by me - I like having only a few things to choose from. I was there during the end weeks of our dreadful winter and it was still pretty cold out, so I ordered the springiest sounding thing on the menu: two kinds of fish with peas, radishes and a risotto made with barley instead of risotto and flavored with Bärlauch.

When the food was delivered to our table, the colors just jumped right off the plate: that gorgeous saffron-yellow broth, the verdant green of the pees and microgreens (just the right amount, too) and the dewy pinkiness of the braised radishes. It was almost too pretty to eat. And such balm for this sun-starved soul!

Luckily, the food was even better than it looked. Not only was the fish perfectly cooked (not such an easy thing to find this town!), but the barley-otto was amazing - it had a tiny bit of bite still, but was just the right amount of creamy. I am not a huge fan of the Bärlauch (or ramp) craze, but here it was delicious - giving the fine pile of creamy barley just a hint of a nice wild taste. The peas were sweet and tiny and I almost got up the nerve to ask the chef where they buy them, because I miss petite peas very much, but I was too much of a chicken.

It is a testament to the deliciousness of the meal that, when I finished, I put down my cutlery and wished the meal had been just a little bit bigger. The service was pretty good and I left feeling very happy and grateful that such places are finding their place in Berlin. And that I'm finding time now and then to discover them for myself, too.

Coledampf's & Companies

Prinzenstrasse 85 D

10969 Berlin (Kreuzberg)
(030) 221 96 095

Jäger und Sammler

All I have to show you from my dinner at Jäger und Sammler is this snapshot of the dining room, taken moments before I left after dinner. I was out with a group of girlfriends and vague acquaintances and felt sheepish about taking a photo when my dinner plate was first placed in front of me, so I hadn't. Eh, I thought to myself. The last I-don't-know-how-many meals I'd had out were such a disappointment that I hadn't even wanted to mention them on the blog. Why would this meal be any different? There was no point in shooting the meal anyway, I figured.

But then it turned out that my dinner, a piece of perfectly cooked salmon (I mean, perfect, folks, textbook) on a bed of sautéed spinach, fingerling potatoes and tiny roasted tomatoes, was delicious. So good that when I cleaned my plate, my first thought was actually to flag down the waitress and ask for another order. I'm not even kidding. It was so good.

The menu is tightly edited - there are only a handful of appetizers and entrées and only two desserts - and the focus is, I'd say, seasonal Italian with German influences. The room is warm yet airy, with Altbau flair - long wooden plank floors, Stuck on the ceiling, a big wall of cookbooks crammed in every which way. And the service is good, friendly, relatively quick. For Berlin, pretty great.

Two in our group ordered beef cheeks that came served on mashed potatoes with broccoli and brussels sprouts and the servings were massive - neither of them could finish their plate. Another ordered spaghetti marinara, in the Italian sense, with clams and mussels, and the serving was so dainty it would have passed as an appetizer in an American restaurant. So there was some unevenness to the portion sizes, I guess. But did I mention how perfect my salmon was? How moist and tender and flaky and delicious it was? How I wished I'd had twice the amount of spinach and tomatoes and potatoes on my plate because they were all so good? Right. Let's put the quibbles aside and just focus on how wonderful it felt to have such a simple, pleasing meal in such a nice space.

So wonderful, in fact, that I'm going back on Friday with my husband and close friends and I plan on trying far more from the menu this time: appetizers, maybe a dessert, and I'll definitely be stealing from our friends' plates. Stay tuned.

Jäger und Sammler
Grunewaldstraße 81
10823 Berlin-Schöneberg
Tel: 030 700 94 084

Karlsbader at Czerr Bakery

First of all, please forgive the slightly dented look this Karslbader is sporting. I bought two last week, ate one right then and there on the sidewalk outside the bakery, flaky bits flying every which way, and then put the other in my bag before setting off on my way to Hugo's baby music class. I figured I'd have time to snap a shot of the Karlsbader later, but later turned out to be the next day, after I'd fished the bag out from under my wallet, a few of Hugo's toys, an empty milk bottle and some groceries. It looks a little worse for the wear here, so please imagine it slightly fluffed and puffed to get a good approximation of what it should look like when freshly purchased.

Second of all, if you don't already know about Czerr bakeries, consider this your hot tip. They are a family-owned small chain of bakeries found only in the greater Wilmersdorf-Friedenau-Schöneberg area. Their products are really solid and delicious (I'm partial to their Kosackenbrot, which makes fabulous whole wheaty toast, and their rustic rectangles of apricot cake, flavored with lavender or almonds) and it makes me feel good to support a family-owned, local bakery that doesn't import Brötchen from China or some similar nonsense.

But my main point is this: I'd forsake everything else Czerr makes to guarantee myself a lifetime supply of their Karlsbader. What, you've never heard of Karlsbader before? Well, I hadn't either until one morning shortly after I moved back to Berlin, I went to Czerr for some breakfast rolls, saw a croissant-type thing on the display shelf, was told it was a croissant made with bread dough instead of puff pastry, bought it, ate it and was smitten on the spot.

Fresh Karlsbader are crisp and flakey, but without any of the greasy fingers or leaden belly croissants can impart. They have that lovely minerally, yeasty tang of good bread dough, but are light as a feather, shattering all over the sidewalk or your plate, depending on where you eat them. I like to wodge a knife of orange marmalade inside of one and then eat it gingerly over my plate. I also like to eat them plain walking down the street. I think Karlsbader are an absolute treasure and one of the best reasons to prove why small independent bakeries must be kept alive by our patronage - if only to keep things like Karlsbader from disappearing from this earth. I've never seen them anywhere else.

Oh, and one last thing: if you want your own, you should head out early - Karlsbader are usually sold out by 11:00 am in the morning...

Yogi Tea Schoko Chai

Tap tap, hello? Is anyone there? I'm feeling more than a little sheepish about how much time has gone by since I last posted. Let's put the blame squarely at my son's feet - born last June - and on the publication of my book - out last September. Forgive me, reader! With patience, I will try to get back here with some regularity.

Let's start with my new favorite tea. My brother-in-law bought it for me for Christmas and it is sort of marvelous.

First of all, it's loose tea, not bagged, otherwise I probably would have gotten rid of it without looking at it twice. Second of all, it's caffeine-free. And third of all, and probably most importantly, it has little cocoa nibs in it. Yes, indeedy.

To brew it, you put a few spoonfuls of the spicy mix in a pot of boiling water and let it simmer for 15 minutes. It looks rather unpromising at first, but as the minutes tick by, the water starts to go a deep reddish-brown color and a wonderful aroma fills the air. Strain the tea into a tea cup and top off with a splash of milk and a little bit of honey (I find chai always needs some sweetener, though I take all my other tea without sugar).

What you've got, then, is a richly flavored, warming chai tea with a subtly chocolate bottom note. It's really delicious and very satisfying, especially if you're trying to kick an afternoon cookie-and-hot-chocolate habit. Ahem.

Japanese Imbiss Heno Heno

Yes, folks, another day, another lunch spot on Kantstraße. I can't help it! It's my little Asiatown.

Actually, Heno Heno is also open for dinner. It's a little sliver of a Japanese Imbiss around the corner from Stuttgarter Platz and I first read about it on Mel's blog. It's really a hole-in-the-wall: There's a counter with stools and then three tiny little tables only big enough for two rather slim eaters. (A warning: There's no restroom.) The vibe is all rather relaxed and homey, which befits the simple menu. Also, there's always good music playing.

Heno Heno serves homestyle Japanese cooking, with almost no sushi in sight (the exception being oshi sushi, an Osakan method of making sushi by pressing rice and herring, in this case, together in a wooden box). There are a few simple appetizers (house-pickled vegetables and onigiri are the plan for my next visit), a few rice dishes topped with meat or vegetables and an array of noodle soups (either udon or soba). That's pretty much it.

The first time I went, I had an udon soup that seemed a lot murkier and grainier than I'd been used to at the noodle shops I used to go to in New York. But it certainly tasted quite authentic, nice and seaweedy and sweet with miso.

The next time, I couldn't resist the edamame (which came at room temperature, sadly; I'd kind of wanted them piping hot), which were delicious - I spooned a little bit of the spice mixture from its beautiful bowl with that delicate little spoon onto the edamame plate and then dunked each bean into the pepper.

For my lunch, I ordered the vegetarian don with an egg on top - the smallest size. Perfect for my appetite, I could just about finish it. What you get is a bowl of hot rice topped with a very molten poached egg, ground sesame seeds, slivered seaweed, cooked greens, sliced scallions, a few mushrooms and shredded carrots. If there was more in there, it was well camouflaged. Using your chopsticks, you hack and mix everything together until you have a fragrant, sweet-salty, chewy mixture of rice and vegetables and sticky egg yolk clumping together under your chopsticks.

With a mug or two of hoji-cha, roasted green tea, it was just the thing for a gray day. Sitting at a small table, marveling at the tiny wooden pepper spoon, a ceramic tea cup nestle in my hands and a few simple Japanese cooking instruments hung over the stove, I almost felt like I'd been teleported somewhere far away. I love that feeling.


Heno Heno
Kantstraße 65
10627 Berlin
(030) 663 073 70

Tandur Oven Bread at Lasan

At Kottbusser Tor, there's a hideous block of apartment buildings built over Adalbertstraße. Tucked underneath the apartment block is a Kurdish Iraqi restaurant called Lasan that boasts an authentic tandur (tandoor) oven for bread-baking.

I've spent many an afternoon standing at the window looking in at the ovoid clay tandur oven, its interior glowing red-hot. A baker neatly portions off balls of bread dough, all the exact same size, then rolls them out quickly with his hands, drapes them over a towel-wrapped mold and then, using the mold, quickly sticks the raw bread dough onto the glowing wall of the tandoor oven. Minutes later, the bread dough puffs and blisters and soon enough, the baker pulls the finished disc of bread off the hot oven wall and flings it, rather elegantly, really, onto a cooling rack. It's mesmerizing stuff.

But I'd never actually gone in and eaten anything there before. Until last weekend, when we were out for a long stroll on Sunday afternoon and found ourselves famished at a strange, in-between time when it wasn't quite lunchtime anymore and it was still far too early for dinner. We headed inside Lasan and figured we could find something light to tide us over. I ordered a plate of hummus and Max got a plate of tabouleh (tabbule, taboulé, as you wish) and a kebab.

I'll get to the bread in a minute, but first of all, people, this tabouleh was a revelation. I'd go so far as to say it was the platonic ideal of all tabouleh. It was incredibly fresh and zingy. Every mouthful felt refreshing. There were tiny flecks of minced onion all throughout, but the onion flavor was really restrained and delicate (which won me over, since big chunks of harsh onions in my mouth never fail to irritate me to no end) - perhaps they'd soaked the onion in ice water before using it? Light and fluffy and with just the right ratio of parsley to bulgur and tomato (equally finely diced as the tomato), I couldn't stop stealing forkfuls off of Max's plate. It was delicious. (Lasan offers a tabouleh sandwich, which might be what I have to order next time I'm there).

The hummus was just fine, creamy and earthy and not too heavy on the tahini. Swiping it with piping hot pieces of tandoor bread torn off the round placed between us was the real fun. Make sure when you go that you get a fresh, hot round of bread. It's crispy on the bottom and chewy on top and fragrant and irresistible. If it's cooled, it loses a lot of its charm.

Another highlight on the menu for a slightly, um, larger gathering is a whole roasted lamb with enough bread for 20 people for the bargain price of 190,- euros. (They'll deliver to your home, if you like.) You'd have to order the sides separately, but doesn't this sound like a pretty great reason to have a party?

Restaurant Lasan
Adalbertstraße 96
10999 Berlin
(030) 698 14 098

Central and Latin American Delights at Aqui España

The other day, on the way to lunch, I stopped in at Aqui España on Kantstraße, just because I was feeling curious. Imagine my delight at finding all sorts of Central and Latin American treats therein, like Mexican goat's milk cajeta, canned tomatillos, tamale wrappers, guava paste, dried salt cod, dried pasilla, guajillo, ancho, arbol and chipotle chiles, dulce de leche in a Russian doll's variety of jar sizes, several different countries' worth of masa and achiote in both ground and pellet form. (There is also a large selection of Spanish and Portuguese goods, from olive oils to cured meats, wines to dry goods.)

I left with a can of tomatillos (I'd only ever eaten them fresh, but some casual Googling assured me that canned tomatillos are a good thing, much like canned tomatoes) and a jar of hearts of palm, but I can't wait to go back for all the ingredients for the Mexican feast I plan to cook soon.

Aqui España
Kantstraße 34
10625 Berlin
(030) 312 3315

Luxa's Hot Sauce

Have you been to Luxa on Torstraße at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz? You need to go, if only for the hot sauce. The hot sauce, people. The hot sauce. It is good enough to eat with a spoon. It is good enough to make you sit around at home and contemplate why this hot sauce is so darn good and what could make it so. Sometimes I think about going to Luxa and asking them for a hot sauce sandwich. Heaven on a plate, trust me.

It's obsession-worthy, especially when paired with their yogurt sauce (that I'll bet you thought was tahini in the photo above, right?). That yogurt sauce, all sour and cool, paired with the hot sauce, which is deeply tomatoey and fruity - but not sweet - and spicy and incredibly fresh-tasting and just, well, perfect - it's enough to make you never want to eat another meat sandwich in Berlin again.

Luxa is run by Kurds (I'm assuming Turkish ones) and it sells schawarma and falafel and an array of Middle Eastern sweets that look, well, sweet. They're not the friendliest food vendors in this city, but I don't even really care. Because of that hot sauce. That hot sauce! It makes up for a multitude of sins.

Luxa
Torstraße 56
10119 Berlin
0171 187 1110

Classic French at Le Piaf

Readers, I'm sorry for the long silence. Finishing the manuscript for my book consumed my August, our honeymoon blessedly took us far away in September and now in October, I've been waiting impatiently to hear back from my editor while battling a nasty flu and trying to meet a clutch of deadlines for freelance assignments, while all the cellphone photos documenting the few meals I had out in Berlin over the past few months languish on my cell.

In any case, I thought I'd make it up to you by coming back with one of my favorite restaurants in Berlin. I might even go so far as to call it my favorite restaurant in Berlin, though, I'm always wary of hyperbole like that. Suffice it to say that this place is pretty darn special. I'm talking about Le Piaf, a small French restaurant tucked into a tiny Vorgarten on Charlottenburg's Schloßstraße.

Run by two French men, one in the kitchen and one in the front of the house, it has a sharply edited everyday menu (terrine and cornichons or snails to start, a few salads, three mains) and a regional menu that rotates every month or so, written up on a few big chalkboards that are propped up around the restaurant. One month, the focus might be on Brittany; the next, for example, is on Provence. There are wine pairings to go with the regional menu and a prix fixe option. The restaurant is made up of a few small rooms, with only a few tables squeezed into each one. This gives the warm, cozy feeling of being in someone's home.

Last winter, Max and I went there one weekend and decided to have a proper French dinner. The regional focus that month was on Burgundy, so I had oeufs en meurette (Max had a plate of tiny, crisp, greaseless fried fish). My poached egg with its molten yolk came in a little casserole pot, balanced on a slice of savory, sauce-soaked toasted bread and doused in more of that delicious, winey meurette sauce. It was hard not to gobble the whole thing up in a matter of seconds. I tried to restrain myself. There was a slab calves' liver in a mustardy cream sauce as a main course, alongside a fabulous slice of potato gratin, all the better for wiping up the delicious sauce. And for dessert, we had vacherin, a confection made up of layers of meringue, whipped cream, raspberry purée and pistachios, all bathed in a pool of not-too-sweet crème anglaise. I thought I was too full for more than a forkful and ended up battling Max for the last shards of dessert.

Everything was so correct, as the French would say. It all tasted just as it should. It was clean, simple, pure food, and done just right. In fact, we ate better at Le Piaf than we did in the entire week we spent in Paris over New Year's (with one exception), much to our surprise.

I could scarcely believe my good fortune. This was the best French food I'd eaten in so long. And it was right around the corner from our place! Plus the waiters were charming, there was a cheese tray (with cheeses from Maître Philippe) and really good Crémant d'Alsace for the apéritif (I am a sucker for sparkling wine). It swiftly become our place for celebrations (if it were open for lunch, we would have celebrated our wedding there, too). Everyone needs that kind of place, don't you think? Le Piaf is it for me.

On the last night of August, the evening I finished my manuscript, I decided I needed to do a little something special for myself. I hadn't showered in days and I'd barely slept. I'd deteriorated to feeding myself potato chips and cereal. The glamorous life of a writer, well, it ain't so glamorous on deadline. But that night in August, I was finally done. I needed to celebrate, but I also needed to be alone. I wasn't ready to even face another person yet. So I headed to Le Piaf. The hostess did a little bit of a double take when I asked for a table for one, but she recovered soon enough and before too long I was sitting alongside a mirrored wall, with a glass of Crémant in front of me.

For dinner, I ordered two appetizers, since I didn't have much of an appetite. First came one huge artichoke with a little pot of creamy vinaigrette (the second pot was spiked with herbs, I didn't like it as much). I peeled off leaf after leaf from the artichoke, dipping it into the vinaigrette and sucking off the sweet vegetal flash with my bottom teeth. The heart was tender and silky. With each leaf, I felt my old self come back. 

I followed with a carpaccio of sea bass and white peaches. The peach slices were firm as could be, but incredibly fragrant and their sweet flavor went beautifully with the fish. There was lemon juice and salt and pepper sprinkled on top to tie everything together. It was the perfect single girl meal: light and restorative, a little indulgent, and most of all, fun. 

Though the hostess had been a little awkward when I asked to sit alone, the French waiter couldn't have been more gracious and polite. I felt really special that night, just as I'd hoped, just as I do every time I go there. I felt well-fed and taken care of, which is a rarity in restaurants these days, not just in Berlin. It's such a little gem, Le Piaf - I hope it never changes. (It's been there for 15 years; let's hope it has just as many years ahead of it.)

Le Piaf
Schloßstrasse 60
14059 Berlin
(030) 342-2040