Touch Your Food

The first time I had African food was in the Height/Ashbury district in San Francisco.  It wasn’t trendy; it was just another culinary voice in the cacophony of city sounds and sites I once knew in my college years.  I remember the large plate with the pancake on the bottom; small dabs of colorful food adorned the top.  I recall the distinct lack of cutlery.  The smiling African waitress offered only folded bits of the same pancake base with which to scoop up the messy morsels.  The food was flavorful and spicy.

On my second visit I decided to take a couple of young ladies I knew from my London semester of study abroad.  They happened to be studying at San Francisco State University as well, so we had our post-London reunion over African food.  As anyone who has had East African food (Eritrean, Ethiopian) knows, the size of the plate correlates to the size of the dining party—a bigger plate and a bigger pancake for a party of three.  Everyone shares from the same plate using their hands.  One of the more uptight ladies in our party interrogated the waitress:  “Am I to assume we get no knife and fork with this?”  The waitress merely laughed and walked away shaking her head.  Later the same young lady informed me that she would never return to that—or any—African restaurant again.  Snotty racist cow.

Europeans and certain ‘upper class’ Americans won’t eat with their hands.  I’ve seen Europeans eat pizza and hamburgers with a knife and fork, and we’re getting tired of it (just ask the New Yawkers at The Bird: ‘Please, at least try eating the damn burger with your hands. All you uptight people with forks and knives are driving us crazy.’)  Some food DEMANDS that you touch it.  Why else would they coin the phrase 'finger food?' An Indian acquaintance I met in Cyprus explained to me as he taught me how to eat Indian food with my hands, “We have five senses.  To not touch your food is to deny the full experience.”  Damn, with logic like that, I’m glad he didn’t try to talk me into trying yoga.  Then I’d have to bounce my foot off his Ghandian ass.  And that would be sad.

In the States we pick up our burritos, tacos, pizza slices, burgers and chicken wings.  I have actually gone weeks without touching a knife or fork.  This weekend qualifies as a forkless nosh period.  Yesterday:  fish tacos (made myself), today: African food at Bejte-Ethiopia in a far flung place in Berlin (Nollendorf Platz). We enjoyed the food, although the pancake was a bit sour for our taste.  Once again, we suspected that they are catering to the locals’ love of everything sour (sauerkraut, anyone?).  But the food itself was delicious, though not quite as spicy as the African restaurants I visited in San Francisco or Munich.  The kicker was the finish.  We had read that they offer a special type of coffee in the joint, so we ordered coffee for two.  It came with a bowl of popcorn and I have no idea why.  I guess they’ve never heard of biscuits or wafers.  I drank the rich, strong coffee and just stared at the popcorn.  I couldn’t cotton to it.

Years ago in Prague, an American picked up his slice of pizza with his hands and heard the muffled mutterings of the Czechs.  They sat there like the dorks that they are, pretending to be all 'Yer Row Culture,’ pizza on the plate, knife and fork in sweaty hands.  Step off, bitches.  Pick up that mother humping pizza, hold it under your nose, look at it and smell it.  As the saliva starts, slide that tasty morsel into your mouth and chew:  LISTEN! Your teeth are talking to you now!

Your Dunkin’ Berliner lesson in the culinary arts has just begun.

Next week:  unleash the Third Eye Chakra in the center of your forehead and head butt your chow!

db Community Service #44: Mexican Food Stores in Berlin

At this precise moment my system is completely devoid of donuts and strong, black coffee.  The bad news is that this blog post will contain no satire, comedic rants or bullshit.  It will, however, contain a review of actual cool shit and 0% faggy poetry as per usual.

If you are from a region where a large part of your diet is Mexican food (like California, or maybe Mexico, but there they just call it 'food'), and you are somehow stuck in a region where the spiciest dish on offer is a hot dog with ketchup and a pinch of curry powder, you will no doubt crave spicy food.  Sure, you can be a chump and buy Chio salsa (90% ketchup) and 8 scrawny tortillas made in Belgium for around 8 EUR for the both of them.

Once you've made that mistake, you will then proceed to make the same mistake with all the other overpriced fake Mexican brands on offer.  Then dump a ton of money hitting all of Berlin's 'Mexican' restaurants and leave feeling like all the expat bulletin board posts you've read recommending the places were really written by the restaurants' owners (they are, btw).

Enter Mitte Meer and Pfefferhaus.  Look no further.  I have pesonally tasted and tested these places (though not everything for sale at these stores, that's impossible) and I can therefore give it the db Seal of Approval.  Mitte Meer has a few branches in Berlin; a new one recently opened in P'berg just up the road from me (though it could be in Pankow proper, as I live in the top part of P'berg away from most of the yuppie douchebags).  There you can find in abundance:  real tortilla chips (2 kinds), tortillas (2 sizes), jalapenos, red jalapenos, red salsas, green salsas, picante sauces, refried beans, refried black beans, chorizos of many varieties, and many, many other foods from countries which don't live on kebabs and currywurst.  The best part is the price:  a huge pack of 18 small tortillas = 2 EUR, a large sized tortilla 18 pack = 3.75.  They even give you discounts for buying in volume (30, 40, 50 EUR, etc.).

RED HOT SAUCES FOR RED HOT PEOPLE

I'm not sure if it is called Das Pfefferhaus or Die Pfefferhaus, but they do ONLY hot sauces, hotter sauces and ring stinger sauces.  That place is no joke.  They've even got brands of hot sauce called "100% Pain" and "Colon Cleaner."  I haven't tried those, mainly because I'm not a frat boy and I would like to keep some living nerve endings on my tongue and in my colon (just in case).  When you walk into the shop (located directly beneath the Alexanderplatz S-bahn tracks on the Alexa side) you will be greeted by the only living German who likes spice.  I say this because A) I love sweeping generalizations, B) Herr Mann opened up a can of hot sauce whoopass on me.  We sampled several types of sauces from a wide variety of regions:  Caribbean, Floridian, Texan, Mexican, Calfiornian and even some evil shit from Tennessee that was called something like Evil Shit From Tennessee.  As I kept sampling, we anted up on the spice scale with each tasting.  By the time we got to the Habanero line, I was coughing and requesting a sip of water, while he was saying that the next hottest one was his favorite.  Though in retrospect, I didn't see him taste the spicier ones.  He may have been a currywurst sucker in disguise.

Suffice it to say, these two places have enough !ay carumba! to keep your tongue flapping while you fall into Johnny Cash's infamous burning Ring of Fire.

Pfefferhaus: http://www.pfefferhaus.de/index.php?page=index
Mitte Meer: http://www.mitte-meer.de/

Chinese Hot Pot: DIY Grub

In some of the more Westernized Asian restaurants, a single chef and/or his team will prepare your food right in front of you.  Often they will fling food and swing blades in the air and make Kung Fu sounds while your shrimp does a swan dive into its oily grave.  Others will chop suey your meat and veggies with all the pomp and circumstance of the Cirque du Soleil.  Generally all of this is overpriced shit for yuppie scum who value the illusion of personal servitude.

Enter: A Berlin-Charlottenburg Restaurant with Chinese Hot Pot, or the Ikea of the Asian restaurant world.  You see, they make you assemble and cook your food yourself.  Genius.  They bring you a gas powered pot divided into two swampy-looking sections of bubbling soup.  Then they bring you piles of raw meat:  fish, shrimp, beef, chicken, pork, mystery meat and more mystery meat.  You are then expected to chuck it into the boiling brine and fish it out with a wire scoop. Don’t get me wrong, I like new cultural experiences, brave new cuisine choices and anything that is not fast food.  That said, I am the single pickiest eater I have ever met.  I hate almost everything that people consider normal, so when I saw the mound of meat next to the two sections of bubbling stew—one white, one brownish red—I had to fight the inner redneck in me which wanted to shout ‘FUCK THIS SWAMP WATER!!! BRING ME SOME FRIED YAK DICK!!!’

So I went with the old standard hot and sour chicken (sadly, they were fresh out of the fried yak dick), which was very similar to the breaded and fried chicken mix with veggies and sauce that you would get in any Chinese restaurant in America.  I’m a culinary chicken, yes, but I got to watch my dining comrades who had ordered the Asian Ikea Meal trying to figure out what the hell to do with the little elbow wrench and the slabs of particle board.  I watched them poke at the mystery meats, dunk, boil, scoop and eventually eat them.  I was comfortably ensconced in my safety net of Plate #22 with rice and a beer, watching with amusement as everyone else was reading the instructions with their meal.   In this case the instructions took the form of the friendly waitress, who was warning people to cook the food at least 5 minutes or else you would—according to her pantomime—make a strange face and rub your torso from the chest down to the pelvis.

One of the Czechs at the table was commenting on the authenticity of the meal, saying to the waitress that he had visited Shanghai, Shaolin and Shoop Shoop (Do Wop). After receiving the approval of our waitress, he pointed out to me that the menu was so authentic that they even had one menu item scrawled in pen in Chinese characters at the bottom of the bill of fare.

“Um, do you think,” I ventured a question, “that the dish written only in Chinese is Sweet and Sour DOG?”

 

Great Asian Food: No Yuppies

I don't usually review food which doesn't consist of deep fried bread dough and lard stuffed with jelly filling, but bear with me:  I've found two great Asian restaurants to get your Chow Fu on in P'berg.  The first is a Real Thai Restaurant called 'Tofu,' and the other is a Chinese restaurant called 'Wok Show.'  I will tell you more about these two places if you promise me up front that you have read the terms and conditions and check the box which says  'I have read the terms and conditions so lay it on me, fool' below this blog.  Those terms:

1) Forgive their silly names.  These are deliberately designed to keep the Yuppie Scum out.  Coupled with their hole-in-the-wall appearances, both of these restaurants strive to do only good food and no neon buddhas and shit.

2) If you go there, don't get drunk beforehand like some Limey hooligans out for a post piss up curry.  If you are a 'Merican redneck, under no circumstances should you push the soup away and bellow "FUCK THIS SWAMP WATER!!! BRING ME SOME FRIED YAK DICK!!!"

3)  If you are any way, shape or form a Yuppie, meaning 'materialistic individuals with no souls and high paying jobs out to ride on the coat tails of other people's experiences and raise their neighborhood rents for good measure,' Stay. The fuck. Away.  

If you agree to these reasonable terms, please get ready to have some fantastic food.

I discovered Wok Show by reading some expat comment forum listing cheap eats in Berlin.  An individual by the name of Sum Dum Fuk said you can get a massive plate of pot stickers (Chinese dumplings) for 5 EUR.  I believe the individual was Asian and I trust him implicitly. I have always hated Chinese fast food because it consists of watery, salty sauce on crunchy, barely cooked vegetables.  This is why I tend to order pot stickers or those wacky Chinese pancakes with the mixed filling and plum sauce (called 'Mu Shi,' and oh how the Germans chuckle when I order that one).  Anything out of the ordinary, other than the usual sheise you normally get in Euro/Asian dumps.  I will cut to the chase now:  bring friends and get yourselves 3 plates of 20 dumplings with various fillings.  The nice lady who is always there will automatically bring you chop sticks, even if you look as white and dorky and clueless as myself.  I recommend putting some dumplings in the small bowl in front of you, soaking it in soy sauce and trying to pick those bad dogs out with those sticks.  After you've dropped a few on the table, feel free to bow and apologize and order knives and forks.  The kind staff will stop laughing at you, turn off the Chinese Candid Camera and bring you the cutlery of your choice. Guten apetit!

'Tofu' Thai restaurant was recommended to me by a Czech friend who has been living in Germany for 20 years.  Normally I wouldn't trust the culinary advice of anyone whose culture cooks with ketchup as a rule.  But since Milan spent many years traveling to and from Asia and he said the place has the proper portrait of the Thai king on the wall and the staff answers you if and when you speak Thai to them.....it's the shizzle.

I know nothing of Thai food because what I've had so far hasn't impressed me.  Cutting to the chase once again, get any of the red or green curry dishes.  Or anything.  I chose the dish with the highest number of chili pepper icons, which was only two. I had a dish last night called something like 'Gak Tung Burn' which was so spicy that I'm still tasting it when I cough. BRILLIANT.  I LOVE spice and find it all but impossible to find spicy food  in Central Europe because Central Europeans are a bunch of fuckin' pussies.  No flavor other the die sauer kraut.

'Tofu' is not a hippy joint in spite of its unfortunate name.  It is a hole in the wall--as is 'Wok Show,' but I have found that the very best food is ALWAYS found in the tiniest, most run down holes you can imagine.  You see, without all the neon buddhas, silk dresses and gold tea cups, they can concentrate on making delicious food while keeping the yuppie hordes out.

Tofu - Erich-Weinert-Straße 1, Prenzlauer Berg

Wok Show - Greifenhagener Str. 3, Prenzlauer Berg