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

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

Brot & Butter's Quarkstulle

The fact that this slice of bread, moist and sour and sporting the thickest, crispiest crust, spread with butter and a half-centimeter of Joghurtquark flavored with chives and seasoned with salt, costs 4 euros and 50 cents (that's $6.40, to put it in perspective) is a little insane. In fact, if I let myself think about it, it's more than insane.

My solution? Not to think about it. And to go to Brot & Butter only rarely, when I'm feeling like I can spend that much money on breakfast (or a very light lunch). But it's too bad the service at Brot & Butter can be brusque and snappish, too. If I'm paying that much for a piece of bread with Quark, I'd like a polite waiter or at least a prompt one. But such is life in Berlin.

On the flip side, the Stulle is delicious. The bread was still warm and the moist crumb combined with the creamy, salty, savory topping was an absolute pleasure. I remember eating one of these last summer, when it was hot and gorgeous for weeks on end, sitting outside at one of the tables in front of Brot & Butter. I'd gone in to order something to drink and the very nice barista offered, faced with my indecision between hot tea or a glass of juice, to purée fresh strawberries into some buttermilk for me. It was such a delicious drink. He was so nice. I loved that morning.

The other day, when I ordered this Stulle, I asked the unsmiling waitress if they might be able to do that again. I probably should have known better when she turned away wordlessly and stalked back into the store. When she returned to my table, she plunked an unopened container of buttermilk, like you'd buy at the grocery store, in front of me with a glass. Ah, yes.

(How do people like this stay employed?)

 

Brot & Butter
Hardenbergstraße 4-5
10623 Berlin
(030) 263 00 346

Sunday Brunch at Café Aroma

The sacred weekend brunch buffet is an institution in Berlin. And though it can be tempting to try out a different café each weekend, trekking across the city in search of 5 euro, all-you-can-eat, groaning tables, I'd venture a guess that you'll get mighty sick of the same array of bought-in-bulk cold cuts, bowls of fruit salad, cubed feta cheese with chopped tomatoes and arugula (at the progressive places!) and boiled eggs as the weeks go on. I know I did. 

Then Sylee told me that a favorite Italian restaurant of mine in Schöneberg, Café Aroma, also did a Sunday brunch. And that it was good! Not the usual cold cuts and Brötchen, she said, and that's really all I needed to know. We headed there the next weekend with some friends.

Café Aroma has been at the top of the adorable Hochkirchstraße, nestled into the Rote Insel part of Schöneberg, since 1987. Run by what seem to be an assortment of Italian friends, both in the kitchen and at the front of the house, it specializes in homey Italian food, simple and pleasing. On Sundays, the restaurant opens at 11:00 and boasts a groaning board placed directly opposite the bar when you walk in. Come hungry and be patient with the limitations of your own belly. You'll want to fill your plate several times.

There are tiny meatballs in tomato sauce so good I'd bottle it. There are lovely roast potatoes, squidgy and herbal. There's poached salmon and roasted peppers. Stuffed mushrooms and cauliflower in homemade béchamel. Wedges of frittata. Breadcrumb-stuffed calamari. Grilled slices of zucchini and eggplants. Little squares of lasagne. Slices of imported Italian salami, tender and almost sweet. Some dishes are there every time we go, some things are new each time we're there.

Everything on the brunch buffet could use an extra dose of salt, but this seems to be a Berlin-wide malaise. I don't really understand it. Otherwise the food is fresh and tasty and impressively varied. Aroma's not interested in using chafing dishes, which results in some dishes that should be served hot being a little lukewarm, but that doesn't really bother me (how un-Italian of me, I know). I'm just so pleased to have found a brunch spot that I love going to again and again.

If you've got room at the very end (I never, ever do), there's always tiramisù and fruit salad and a few other desserts (the last time we went, there were creampuffs and a berry-topped Bavarian cream).

It feels like our own little Berlin secret, to be nestled in Aroma's four walls on a sleepy Sunday morning, hearing the waitress banter in Italian with the bartender while we munch away contentedly. A walk up and down the streets of the Rote Insel afterwards, passing the cemetery where the Brothers Grimm are buried, helps with digestion and prolonging that languid Sunday feeling.

Café Aroma
Hochkirchstrasse 8
10829 Berlin
(030) 782 5821

Barbara's Kaffeetafel - Lunch at the Market

These past few weeks have been of the magical Berlin sort. You know, the kind where you walk outside your front door and are sort of overwhelmed with the loveliness of Berlin. Or is it just me? In any case, I'm grateful for it, for all the trees losing their blossoms and carpeting the streets with white and pink clouds, for the good, fresh air, for the happy crowds spilling out from cafés and on the banks of the lake near my house, for getting to live here.

And I'm grateful that when I go to a green market as lovely and bustling as the one at Winterfeldtplatz (so buzzy and crowded compared to when I used to go there with my mother, thirty (!) years ago), gathering up rhubarb, scallions, asparagus, fresh butter and good bread galore, thereby working up a slightly ferocious appetite, that there is bowl of puckery potato salad and Maultaschen in a savory, homemade broth just waiting for me, right there in the market.

Barbara's Kaffeetafel sells all manners of cakes (and a seriously gorgeous, burnished poppyseed Hefezopf), but what seems to truly be the bulk of her market business, at least, are her homemade Maultaschen (Swabian ravioli, for lack of a better descriptor), filled with meat (traditionally) or a spinach-fresh cheese mix. You can buy the Maultaschen by the piece to take with you or you can order a few for lunch right then and there. They come floating in a light, tasty beef broth or are served next to vinegary, faintly oniony potato salad (I could eat just the potato salad and be happy, too - it's pretty stellar). They're very good - savory and filling, the pasta dough toothsome with just the right amount of chew. The stand also sells freshly prepared salads - sliced beets or cabbage slaw, for example. Barbara's Kaffeetafel also caters, makes wedding cakes, offers cooking classes at your house, even delivers homemade cakes to you, if desired.

We ate our lunch standing up at the table next to the stand, just like I used to eat my Würstchen on that very same market square as a little kid with a bowl cut and stripey pants, and I practically got the shivers with happiness at this whole full-circle business.

Burrito Bowls at Dolores

I'd heard about Mission-style burritos being served at a Mexican joint in Mitte called Dolores for a while. I wasn't all that eager to get there, since burritos had never really been my thing. But one night, after a movie at Babylon and starved for dinner in those darkened streets where food can be very hard to find, we found ourselves looking into the bright, colorful Dolores.

It turns out that Dolores doesn't just do burritos. Their menu reads like a souped-up version of Chipotle's, with burrito bowls, salads, agua frescas and soups rounding out the offerings. We put together our burrito bowls, which came topped with homemade tortilla chips and sat down to dig in. I was underwhelmed. The iceberg lettuce piled on top skeeved me out a little and the food beneath it was just okay. Eh, I thought. Another disappointment. Par for the course.

But my friends Margue and Daniel, whose tastes I always trust, raved about Dolores whenever I saw them and when we found out that Dolores was opening another location on Wittenbergplatz, far closer to all of us than the Mitte location, they could barely contain their glee. What was I missing? I had to go back and find out.

I am so glad I did. For one, the Wittenbergplatz location is lovely. It's airier and bigger than the original one in Mitte, with a lovely view out onto the square, the fountain and KaDeWe.

Second of all, the food was really good. According to their website, the Wittenbergplatz location is offering some new items that the Mitte location doesn't yet have, like soft tacos. I saw pork pibil on the menu, made with organic meat, achiote and habañero peppers, and I practically did a double take. They must mean business, I thought. After all, there's no way to tame down a habañero, right? So that's what I got in my burrito bowl, along with a couple different spicy salsas (if you eschew sour cream and cheese, they'll let you get two salsas).

The meat was saucy, complex, spicy and falling apart at the poke of a fork, while the salsas were fresh and delicious and as spicy as they promised to be. In other words, just right. I ate up my entire bowl, even the iceberg lettuce. (Which still skeeves me out. But I'm willing to look past it now.) And couldn't get over how good it was, especially after I'd been so underwhelmed the first time. (I blame it on the chicken?)

I've been back a number of times since. I even ordered the chipotle soy meat once and you know what? Combined with the fajita veggies and the three-chile salsa cruda, it wasn't half bad. In fact, I could get kind of used to it. But the pork pibil is still the thing to order here.

Long live the habañero! Bless you, Dolores, for keeping things spicy.

Dolores Wittenbergplatz
Bayreuther Strasse 36
10789 Berlin
(030) 548 21 590

TU Cafeteria Lunch with a View

When my father moved to Berlin 40 (!) years ago, he had an office in the Telefunken Haus on Ernst-Reuter-Platz. Whenever I pass it, which is all the time, it makes me think of him. Imagine my delight when our friends told us to meet them for lunch there one day, in the cafeteria on the top floor.

The TU has a cafeteria on the top floor and it's open to the public. You don't need to be a student or an employee of the university, you just need to know where to go (all the way to the top). When you alight, you'll have a pretty spectacular view. Siegessäule! Fernsehturm! If you squint, Brandenburger Tor!

And in the other direction, Bismarckstraße aka Kaiserdamm, Teufelsberg, Funkturm. Plus, solar panels!

The day we were there, the cafeteria was serving vegetarian pasta or Königsberger Klopse with mashed potatoes and salad.

It's cafeteria food, you know, so it's not winning any awards. But it was warm and filling and the capers had a vinegary bite and the salad was fresh and snappy. (Also, uh, it's cheap.) Plus the view is hard to be beat. While we ate and chatted, I liked imagining my 20-something father in his office somewhere below us, doing his math, looking out the window, contemplating his new Berlin life.

Cafeteria TU Skyline
Ernst Reuter Platz 7
10587 Berlin
(030) 939 39 7780

Meierei

The Kaspressknödel (cheese dumpling) floating in that plate was pretty heavenly, all gooey and chunky and wonderful, but the broth is what really got me. I have yet to master a good beef broth and the folks cooking at Meierei gave me serious broth envy. There are clearly real cooks running the kitchen (a rarity in this city) and it's a pleasure to eat what they're making.

A small sliver of a place on Kollwitzstraße in Prenzlauer Berg, Meierei serves up Alpine specialties for lunch: hearty goulashes with fork-tender, high-quality meat, delicate broths with various "Einlagen" of dumplings or strips of omelets, chewy, crusty pretzels and salads. It also functions as a small-scale deli-bakery, selling big rounds of bread, imported hot chocolate mixes, great bags of traditional Swiss spice cookies, Austrian wine and more.

I loved sitting in the window on a bar stool, slurping up my savory broth and watching the world walk by. We've only got a few weeks left of the kind of weather suited to this food, so I plan on making the most of them.

Meierei
Kollwitzstraße 42
10405 Berlin
(030) 921 295 73