Berlin on a Platter

Kochtail Kitchen Shop

True story: I used to own a Lodge cast-iron pan. I kept it in an overhead kitchen cabinet, sort of propped upright against some cutting boards. Space was at a premium, these were my New York days, what can I say. (My Queens days, to be specific, when I actually had more kitchen space than I used to, but still, things were tight.) Anyway, one day I opened up the kitchen cabinet to get down a cutting board and as I pulled out the board, the equilibrium in the stack shifted and before I could do anything besides move out of the way and duck, my cast-iron pan came hurtling out of the cabinet down onto the pink and gray linoleum floor. Where it broke into two pieces. Not even kidding. (Trust me, I didn't think it was possible, either.)

When I lived in New York, I had several favorite kitchen stores. There was the second floor of Zabar's, of course, my first love and my across-the-street neighbor for my first four years in New York, and then there was Broadway Panhandler, back when they were on Broadway and not on 8th Street. Later on, when 18th Street became the center of my universe, I started frequenting a random kitchen supply store on East 17th Street that was run by a Chinese man. But then I moved to Berlin and lost of all those sources in one fell swoop.

It's not as if there aren't kitchen supply stores in Berlin and certainly KaDeWe has a very nice fourth floor (in fact, we registered there for our wedding) and Galeries Lafayette's basement area is okay in a pinch. But none of these places made my heart sing the way my old NYC stores did. Until I found Kochtail.

Kochtail is a kitchen store on Invalidenstraße 150 (and, for a limited time, in Europa-Center, for you (us) Wessies) run by an American couple. It has pretty much everything you'd ever want or need (among many, many other things, Le Creuset pots and copper mixing bowls and those awesome flexible bench scrapers and Benriner mandolines and every kind of cookie cutter under the sun and French Duralex glasses and those super-chic trash cans from Wesco and LODGE CAST-IRON PANS, for goodness sakes). It has square cake pans and Silpat baking pads and pie beads and Keep Cups and a huge section for cocktail accessories, including those incredible molds for one round ball of ice. Also, Kochtail is a boon for expat cooks and bakers (or Germans who use American cookbooks) because they have a great stock of measuring cups and spoons, plus oven thermometers and electronic scales.

I love how thoughtfully laid out the store is and the fact that Joe, one of the owners who's in the store most days, is kind, helpful and very funny. To run a great kitchen store, you need to have a good sense of what matters to cooks and bakers. Joe and his partner are passionate about cooking and baking and you see that passion reflected in every detail of the store. It's a lovely place to get lost in. It's also a very difficult place to practice restraint in. Little wood-handled mushroom brushes! Madeleine pans! Weck jars in every shape and size! Those flat plastic thingies you use to comb texture into cake frosting! IRRESISTIBLE, I tell you.

Kochtail
Invalidenstraße 150
10115 Berlin
Tel: (030) 284 069 74

And, for a limited time at Europa-Center. Just to the left after you enter from Breitscheidplatz.

Chicago Williams BBQ

Forgive the hideous photo which in no way reflects the quality of our meal at Chicago Williams. It's just, the place was dark, my phone is a little old, you get the picture. Right?

The scene: Saturday afternoon, a few weeks ago. My husband and I had unexpectedly come into some unplanned babysitting hours. Suddenly, a thought. Dinner out! A date! It didn't take long to decide on where to go. Marguerite had, weeks earlier, said that Chicago Williams was among the best BBQ she'd ever had. (!) Visions of cold drinks and smoky meat danced in our heads. The last good BBQ we'd eaten was on the book tour, at Hill Country in DC. We called up, reserved a table and headed east.

At Chicago Williams, you order at the bar from a blackboard. There are platters and sandwiches and sides to choose from and the bartender will, in a pinch, help you decide. (The ribs are non-negotiable, he said, and he was right. He nudged us towards mashed potatoes, we settled on cole slaw instead.)

We ordered a platter that included three meats (pulled pork, ribs and chicken) and two sides (baked beans - our Kryptonite - and cole slaw). We'd reserved far too last-minute to get a coveted table outside and instead were seated together with a few other people at a communal table. As we waited, deafening music played. I know I sound like an old lady, but it sort of drove me nuts. I could barely hear my husband talk. Just a few decibels lower would have helped, but Chicago Williams is not the kind of place where you ask them to turn down the music. You just think to yourself: next time I'm sitting outside.

Our food came served on a plastic tray lined with a sheet of wax paper. The ribs were, in fact, delicious. The chicken was really good (even better the next day!). The pulled pork was good, too, though a little on the dry side. I like a saucy pulled pork myself. The cole slaw was heavy on the mayo, but suitably refreshing. The only miss were the baked beans - semi-crunchy and missing that oozing, melty, sticky quality that makes baked beans one of the best things on earth to eat.

Still, the BBQ was really solid. We both so enjoyed our meal. And the atmosphere, loud music notwithstanding, was fun. I'd say it's a particularly great place to go with a group.

Chicago Williams BBQ
Hannoversche Strasse 2
10115 Berlin
Tel: (030) 280 42 422

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

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

Celebrating Asian Tapas at Transit

Oh, how I have despaired over the state of Asian food in Berlin. There are a few gems here and there, but for the most part it's a sad state of affairs - sticky-sweet sauces, deep-fried foods, "Thai" sushi (heaven preserve us) and other abominations. Where were the loud dim sum halls I knew from New York, filled with stone-faced ladies pushing carts filled with myriad kinds of delicate dim sum? Where were my beloved pea shoots? Cambodian sandwiches? Malaysian laksas?

Gone, baby, gone - that's what happens when you leave New York for Berlin. You leave behind cockroaches, expensive apartments, leaky subways and transcendant Asian food. But I decided I could live with that. After all, I moved to Berlin for far better reasons than the food. Right? Right.

When Max went out to dinner with a friend last year and came home raving about the restaurant, Transit on Rosenthaler Strasse, I was interested but on my guard. Max was known to order "Thai" curry, after all, from a dodgy "Chinese" storefront on Lietzenburger Strasse run by Vietnamese cooks. But he also fell in love with the underground food courts in Flushing, gobbling up incendiary dan dan noodles and cumin-dusted Xinjiang meat skewers. So I knew he knew from good Asian food.

The restaurant had a small plates menu and Max couldn't stop talking about all the crazy flavors, textures and tastes he had sampled in each plate. Asian tapas? It sounded gimmicky and weird to me. But he was so enthusiastic and so excited that I had try it for myself.

It turns out he was right - Transit is delicious.

The menu is made up of a bunch of small plates with goofy names. Chicken Little, Bathing Beauty, Little Swimmer - you get the picture. The food ranges from spicy (really) Thai salads (green papaya, grilled beef, chunks of fruit with chile and peanuts) to velvety curries to a luscious assortment of dough-wrapped delights like duck with plum sauce in Chinese pancakes with slivers of cucumber or minced chicken and mushrooms in steamed rice dough. It's a mish-mash of Thai and Vietnamese dishes with some Chinese and Indonesian influences.

From the meat to the vegetables, everything is very fresh and nothing tastes canned, not even the crazy sweet-sour sauce enveloping deep-fried chicken skin, pineapples and peanuts. This is definitely the menu's trashiest offering (and Max's guilty pleasure). To balance it out, though, you can order a plate of stir-fried vegetables, which, on our last visit, included gai lan as well as regular broccoli, and that made me almost as happy as a plate of pea shoots would.

For two people, we usually order somewhere between 6 and 8 dishes. The room is bustling and busy (make sure you have a reservation if you go) and in the summer, there's a lovely garden out back as well. Who knew that of all places, this one would turn into the place we go when we have something to celebrate? Berlin is full of surprises.

Transit
Rosenthaler Strasse 68
10119 Berlin
(030) 247 816 45

A Hamburger at the Grand Hyatt

The Berlin International Film Festival is off and running, so for any of you on the hunt for something good to eat while strolling around Potsdamer Platz - or, rather, exiting a movie theater bleary-eyed and blinking - here's an idea: head to the Hyatt.

The Grand Hyatt, to be exact. There, in the lobby, you'll find a little cluster of comfortable sitting chairs and low tables, with a sort of futuristic-looking fireplace giving off warmth and a quiet little dining room alongside. Collapse into one of the chairs, or if you're feeling alert, ask to sit at a proper dining table. You'll be brought a menu, though I'll admit I barely looked at mine since I already knew what I wanted to order. So you can eschew the menu, I suppose, if you, too, are in the mood for a hamburger (or cheeseburger, if we're splitting hairs). You can just tell your server right away, "the hamburger, please" and because you're in a fancy hotel lobby and sitting in a plush sitting chair and ordering a hamburger at midday (though it's on the menu in the evening, too), you'll feel like you're a modern-day Doris Day or something.

What happens next is that the waiter will bring you a little plate with adorable little jars of mustard, mayonnaise and Heinz ketchup (be still my beating heart!) and this will charm you to pieces or at least make you very, very hungry. Order something to drink, too: at lunchtime, your beverage and a post-prandial coffee or tea is included in the price of lunch (in this case, 13 euros). A deal! At the Grand Hyatt! It will make you feel even more special.

Next, the burger will appear, plated rather grandly on an oval plate balanced by two tiny pickle spears and a tangle of cabbage. Folks, let's cut right to the chase: It is a very good burger. It is beefy, if you can forgive the unimaginative adjective, and substantial. In fact, I split the burger with my friend, and the half-burger was very definitely enough lunch for me (don't forget that it comes with fries). The meat is fresh as can be and cooked just right. It tastes...clean, if you know what I mean. In a good way. It is missing the right amount of seasoning - I will preemptively cross my fingers for you that by the time you have a hamburger at the Hyatt, the chef will have started adding more salt to his patties - but a lot can be corrected with the right amount of ketchup (in my book, at least).  The accompanying fries, delicious ones, will be delivered to your table in a separate bowl and you will eat almost all of them. Okay, fine, all of them, alternatingly dunked in mayonnaise and ketchup and sometimes in a swirl of both.

The staff is very sweet and friendly (they even brought out cookies for the littlest member of our lunch party along with our coffee) and they will let you wile away on the comfortable chairs as you warm yourself next to the fireplace long after lunch is over. The restaurant apparently also serves other classic dishes, like Schnitzel and sole and steak, but - for now, at least - it's my go-to place for a burger.

Grand Hyatt Berlin
Tizian Lounge & Restaurant
Marlene-Dietrich-Platz 2
10785 Berlin
(030) 255 31 527

Lunch at Chipps

Ask me how hard it is to get a well-dressed salad at a restaurant - any restaurant, in any city - and I'll tell you: hard. Greens too wilted, dressing too thick, ratio of bitter to soft lettuces off-kilter, the danger of mealy tomatoes lurking at every turn: making a good, plain salad is hard work, as so often the simplest stuff is.

So when the starter salad at Chipps, tucked away on the corner of Jägerstrasse, in the shadow of the foreign ministry, turned out to be such a perfect little bowl of vinaigrette-speckled mesclun, with little cubes of cucumber strewn on top, and salted just so, I was rather pleased.

Unfortunately, it was about the only thing at lunch that was done well. My lunch plate, a tangle of insipid sauerkraut (even the stuff in bags at the supermarket has more character and bite than this did), a little pile of bland potato salad (sadly lacking in vinegar, salt and other channels of flavor) and a vegan sausage (actually, I won't complain about the sausage because it was entirely my fault to have ordered a vegan sausage) was just sort of sad. Sad because this is Berlin and it should be easy, dead easy, to serve both sauerkraut and potato salad that makes your mouth water, even if you are a trendy, charcoal-painted eatery with an open kitchen and good-looking waitstaff.

It made me wish I could send the cooks on an educational excursion to Rogacki, which makes the very best sauerkraut in this entire city and several different potato salads that are all addictively delicious and full of zip and flavor.

My lunch partner didn't even have the pleasure of a good little salad to start: her squash soup was redolent with the flavor of dehydrated bouillon granules and her main, a noodle dish, was sauced in the very same squash soup, only slightly reduced and thickened.

The restaurant's design is lovely - it has sort of that urban, rustic feel that feels comfortable yet special at the same time, daylight pours in from the wall of windows and the lighting is warm and inviting. But unless the handsome open kitchen starts producing food that befits both the prices being charged and the modern feel of the room, it's not worth a visit.

Chipps
Jägerstrasse 35
10117 Berlin
(030) 364 44 588

Banh Mi at Cô Cô

I remember having dinner on a subway in New York City last year, after a long day in the office. I'd worked until after 9:00 pm. To reward myself, to keep myself going, I promised to do something special for dinner, instead of swallowing down a lukewarm slice on my rush to Penn Station to catch the train going home. So when the computer was turned off and the dark office left behind, I went downtown instead of uptown, to Baoguette, where I got a banh mi for dinner, stuffed with fresh herbs, crisp pickles, incendiary slices of jalapeño, hot sauce, and gossamer slices of pork and pâté. I know eating dinner on the subway is totally grody-to-the-max, but as I savored the spicy, sour, crunchy, creamy, crusty sandwich all by myself on a deserted subway back uptown (taking breaks to wipe my brow because - hoo boy - it was spicy), I didn't care in the least.

(By the time I left New York, my favorite banh mi in the city was actually Cambodian num pang, at the eponymously named Num Pang. Three words: Hoisin. Veal. Meatballs.)

All of this to say, I really, really like banh mi.

At the very recently opened Cô Cô at Rosenthaler Platz, banh mi are prepared by a gaggle of people working the counter, where the fillings are all arrayed neatly and rather antiseptically below a vitrine so you can watch the sandwich-making in action while you wait. The place itself is nicely furnished - it's sleeker than I expected, with communal tables and bar stools and fresh flowers, but also with great big baskets of fresh ginger and oranges for...atmosphere.

The sandwiches are quite nice - we tried the Special and the tomato meatball (which I liked best) - but they are completely and utterly lacking in heat. If you want your banh mi hot (isn't that sort of the point?), you have to specify that when you order your sandwich. After a few bites, I went back to the counter to ask for hot sauce and was given a little paper cup filled with sliced red chiles. Nowhere near the level of heat I was expecting, but certainly better than nothing.

It was disappointing - is the German aversion to spice really such that new businesses won't even try to slip a little bit in? Especially when it's an integral part of an authentic dish? Come on, people, be brave!

But the rest of the sandwich - the do chua (lightly pickled carrots and radish) was fresh and vibrant, the crusty baguette (made only with rice flour, apparently) was crispy and yielding in just the right places, and the meat fillings were aromatic and tasty - was fine. The house green tea is lovely - unsweetened, aromatic with ginger and served cool, it was the kind of thing I wish I had in big jugs to drink every day. It'd do a great job cooling off an over-heated tongue after a properly spicy banh mi, too. Wink wink.

Cô Cô is open until 10:00 pm and midnight on weekends.

To try next, banh mi at Kreuzberg's Babanbé...

Cô Cô
Rosenthaler Strasse 2
10119 Berlin
(030) 246 30 595

Oliv Café

I find myself looking for excuses to get to Münzstrasse, just so I have a reason to stop in at Oliv Café, which has swiftly become one of my favorite cafés in Berlin. The most favorite? It's possible. Sleek and simple, with an eye towards design, and with people in the kitchen who are very good at what they do, it's such a lovely place.

I like stopping in for a cup of Kusmi tea and an afternoon snack, like crustless German cheesecake baked in a Bundt pan or a crusty fruit crumble, individually baked in a tall, thin Weck jar. But it's also a great place for lunch, either in the form of a simple sandwich (a lovely, crusty roll, say, topped with thin slices of good cured meat, a wafer of radish and a small tangle of shredded beet) or a wedge of quiche, with zucchini, for example, that's rather flat and not too rich and sporting a thin, tender crust that I wish I could recreate at home.

(I didn't think the soup, over there on the right, was much to write home about. It tasted store-bought or canned or something in between.) I like that the tiny salad that comes on the side of the quiche is dressed with a good vinaigrette and toasted sunflower seeds.

The other week, as we were paying the bill, we decided - on a whim - to get something sweet for dessert. By the cash register was a glass cookie jar filled with cookie orbs, coated in powdered sugar. I thought they were going to be like polverones, but they turned out to be almond cookies, moist and fragrant, and in the middle - surprise! - was a candied cherry. I always thought cherries and almonds together were sort of a cliché. Silly me. The cookie was just big enough for two bites and a very satisfying end to the meal.

Oliv Café
Münzstrasse 8
10178 Berlin
(030) 892 065 40

Chi Sing

Despite the ethereal paper swans and pretty white flowers decorating Chi Sing - a "Hue-inspired" restaurant in Mitte, I found the atmosphere there oddly cold and uninviting during a dinner with friends in from New York a few weeks ago. Our food was fine, but nothing special. The best thing I ate was an appetizer of grilled eggplant marinated in a nuoc mam-rich dressing with scallions, hot chiles and sesame seeds.

We ordered many appetizers and main dishes and drinks, yet weren't brought the tap water we requested at the beginning of the meal until we received the check. I know that stinginess with tap water (Leitungswasser) is a hallmark of Berlin restaurant dining, but it never fails to irritate me.

In a city where Vietnamese restaurants are a dime a dozen, pretty décor only goes so far. I'd rather be eating at Good Morning Vietnam.

Chi Sing
Rosenthaler Strase 62
10119 Berlin
(030) 200 89 284