Mexiko: Nichts wie weg hier!

One of my earliest food memories is eating steak tacos in Nogales, Mexico with my mother and grandmother when I was about four. I can't explain it, but for whatever reason the taste of that steak taco is more vivid to me than things I've eaten much more recently: the soft flour tortilla, the charred pieces of meat, and the shredded ice berg lettuce - nothing else. In hindsight, it seems unlikely that I would have been allowed to eat lettuce even in border town Mexico, so maybe we were in Tucson and I am blending memories, but the taste is still very real to me. Good Mexican food was a constant in my life until I moved abroad and, while I make it at home with self-imported ingredients, a lack of good Mexican always seems like an oversight in city planning to me, unfair as that may be. Still, somehow I prefer this lack to subpar Mexican restaurants. Few things make me sadder than bad Mexican food. I will admit to feeling a twinge of guilt about this post because I'll be the first to acknowledge that in the six years I've lived in Berlin, Mexican food has improved dramatically. In my early days, the Mexican food to be found here made taco bell look autentico. Many of those restaurants were run by Bangladeshis who had never been anywhere near Mexico. I'm sure they were top-notch Bangladeshi cooks and I so wish they had focused on that, but instead there wasn't any remotely good Bangladeshi or Mexican food to be found. Today there are several Mexican restaurants in Berlin with an actual Mexican on board. At first glance, these establishments look like places I have happily frequented in gentrified areas of various major US cities - the walls are painted bright colors, Mexican streamers decorate the ceilings...The menus look familiar, too: tacos de carnitas, chilaquiles, burritos con tinga de pollo. I sort of wish I had only ever looked into these restaurants and never actually eaten at them. I know all too well that you have to cook the food that your customers want to eat, but I have cooked traditional Mexican food for Germans on several occasions and my guests seemed pretty happy. Honestly, I do not know how the Mexicans involved in these restaurants sleep at night. That may sound extreme. I told you, Mexican food is close to my heart. In the interest of full disclosure, I at at Maria Bonita a few times a couple years ago and remember liking it. I don't have a great excuse for not having been back except that I don't live nearby anymore, they only have a few stools so it's not a great place for catching up with friends, and I've read that it's gone down hill. Tonight we'd planned to go to Maria Peligro, Maria Bonita's Kreuzberg outpost, which is or I should say was, a real restaurant with chairs and tables, but I noticed in the afternoon (by chance) that it is now closed. We almost went to Ta'Cabron, but ended up at Santa Maria (the remaining sister of Maria Bonita). Ta'Cabron seemed a little far for someone this pregnant to travel with no guarantee (and little hope) of a good dinner. I've read a few good things about it, but also a lot of not so good things. I had eaten at Santa Maria a year or so ago and not really liked it, but it seemed a good compromise location-wise and they do also have tables and chairs. Any restaurant can have an off night, I figured... Alas, the food doesn't seem to have changed at all - not a good thing. I had tacos de carnitas and my friend had a burrito de verduras. Neither one of them was disgusting ... but neither was good either. As for the burrito, Mexico actually has a lot of good vegetable dishes. For the life of me, I can't understand why a restaurant claiming to serve "classic street style" food would stuff their vegetarian burrito with eggplant and roasted red peppers. Again, it was fine......not remotely classic and the tamarind-habanero marinade was not at all detectable, but a bean burrito can be a thing of such beauty. There's just no need to be creative, especially when you haven't mastered the basics. And the tacos. Sad, sad tacos. I think the corn tortillas at Santa Maria are actually very good, but they are tiny and when buried under huge piles of greasy meat - you can't appreciate them at all. In fact, it's absolutely impossible to pick up the tacos - you can't even begin to fold the sides in, there's just too much meat. And honestly, the meat isn't all that great. As mentioned, it is way too greasy and there isn't really any spicing, which would be ok if it weren't for the grease and if the carnitas had been properly crisped. Or if there were less of it. Or if was served with anything vegetal beyond a sad miniscule pile of salsa fresca and some minced onions. Santa Maria would save money and make vastly better tacos if they used half the meat and garnished each taco with some shredded iceberg lettuce (here in the land of iceberg lettuce salads no less), a couple sliced radishes, and maybe a cilantro leaf or two. Perhaps they are trying to satisfy meat-happy German customers, but to me the people behind Santa Maria are telling you through their food that Mexican food is simplistic (slap a pile of whatever meat on a plate, don't worry about flavor or texture or ...) and not worth making an effort for. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the cooking at Santa Maria is lazy and lacks soul. If I didn't have two quarts of carne seca in my freezer and a couple cans of green chile in my pantry, I think I'd cry myself to sleep. Santa Maria Oranienstrasse 170 For the record, I've also had disappointing food at Dolores (yes, the quality of the tortilla is important, even in Cal-Mex) and Tipica (actually worse the the meal I had at La Paz in Prenzlauer Berg, one of the old-style Mexican joints possibly Bangladeshi-owned more than six years ago when my now-husband was trying to show me how cosmopolitan the Berlin food scene was - I must really like him to have moved here after that meal).

Martinique: Ich wusste es schon (aber wirklich)

I've walked or biked past the Martinique Restaurant & Cafe many times and never had any desire whatsoever to eat there. Actually, I never thought it had anything to do with the Caribbean island other than a shared name. I was quite surprised to find out that the restaurant offers a "surprising and refreshing" mix of the cuisines from Germany's Baden region and the island of Martinique. Well, that's what the website says anyway. Martinique the Restaurant looks like (and basically is) your standard Eckkneipe or corner bar, which in Germany usually means a smoky establishment serving mostly beer, frequented by locals. These kinds of places are never trendy or fancy, they're often on the dingy or tacky side (blinky gambling machines and bad lighting), and for the most part, the only decent thing you can count on getting is beer. Sometimes, as in the case of Martinique, basic food is on offer - it's usually not homemade or very good (at least in these parts). So, I have to give Martinique credit for doing something a little different (apparently the owner has family in Martinique). Still, the menu has three supposedly Martinique items: a salad with pineapple, mango, and shrimp; fried potato wedges with Caribbean dipping sauces; and a wrap that sounded a lot like a burrito with ground beef and corn. The wrap wasn't available on the night we visited - alas. Mein Mann's meal came with potato wedges and dipping sauces - maybe you only get the Caribbean dips if you order them a la carte, but glooey red sauce from the Asian foods store (Germans LOVE this glop) and some frightening mayonaisey substance do not scream Caribbean to me. Nor are they homemade as the menus claims. Details....I tried to order something from Martinque, I really did. But potato wedges (from the freezer I might add) do not a dinner make and I am squeamish about cheap frozen shrimp, which was definitely going to be the case in the Martinque salad. I ordered Maultaschen Suppe (a brothy soup with German ravioli), which is most definitely from Baden. It was about as bad as I had expected. As fun as a Baden-Martinique restaurant sounds (and I'm guessing this is probably the only one in existence?).....nothing on the menu would be remotely recognizable as typical to someone from Martinique. If the Baden dishes were any good, I might be able to let the Martinique food slide (a little), but they are pretty awful. In keeping with standard Eckkneipe food, but that help much in my book. Sad, sad, sad. Martinique Restaurant & Cafe Monumentenstrasse 29

Mazedonien: ich wusste es schon

Why a German restaurant pretending to be an Italian restaurant is even bothering to call itself Restaurant Macedonia is beyond me. I'm not a total idiot and I do bring my low expectation every time I go out in this city, but I felt I couldn't skip Macedonia because I sort of skipped Luxembourg and have major guilt. In my defense Alt Luxembourg doesn't make any claims to serve actual Luxembourgian food, although from what I gather, Luxembourgian cuisine is sort of a Franco-German mishmash, so who knows? The website doesn't explain why it's called that, but I think it may have to do with a previous use for the building that now houses the restaurant. Anyway, it's expensive and apparently was once a very well-regarded spot, back when Charlottenburg was trendy...but the odds of it actually being good enough to justify the prices, just seemed too slim. Sorry.

I probably would have also passed Macedonia by if it wasn't mere feet from the Lichterfelde West S-Bahn station, which I had to go by anyway. I popped in for lunch and it was fine. Not the worst meal I've had this week. The place is run by actual Macedonians, speaking what I presume was Macedonian (it certainly wasn't German or Italian) to each other, the waitress was having her lunch while I had mine - a big chunk of feta, a fried egg, a bunch of olives and a hunk of bread. I was tempted to ask if I could have what she had, but decided to stick to the menu, most of which is Italian: the standard pasta dishes, pizzas, involtini and saltimboca, etc. Oddly, all the specials of the day were German: pork roast with potatoes and red cabbage and Koenigsberger Klopse (a classic dish of meatballs in a creamy caper sauce) and literally all the other customers, who I might add were a good 30+ years older than me, were eating the German specials. Ever the rebel, I stuck to the small Macedonian portion of the menu, your standard Balkan options: cevapcici (old friend), kebab-type things served with rice, etc. Not so much in the mood for cheap meat, I ordered a Macedonian bean dish, gravce tavce, which I later learned is the Macedonian national dish. It's basically a white bean stew, apparently with as many variations as there are Macedonian housewives. At Restaurant Macedonia they use gigante beans, cooked in a tomato-y sauce with peppers and onions, warmed under the broiler with sprinkling of feta cheese. It's a simple dish and it wasn't half bad, though it was over-salted. Not something I would trek across town for by any means, but not a horrible lunch on a snowy winter day. I can't help but wish the Macedonians at Restaurant Macedonia were pushing their cuisine a bit more. It's not as if Berlin needs another mediocre Italian or German restaurant, but judging by the elderly clientele ordering plates and plates of Koenigsberger Klopse, I guess they've concluded that gravce tavce and cevapcici alone don't pay the bills. Restaurant Macedonia Hans-Sachs-Strasse 4f

Der Libanon: lecker und deftig

There are countless Middle Eastern restaurants in Berlin - most of them would, however, be described as an Imbiss - usually a bit of a hole in the wall, with a few tables and only counter service. For the most part, all of these places serve the same menu - falafel, schawarmas, hummus, and baba ghanoush in sandwich or platter form. Similarly, there's very little price range - sandwiches usually cost around 3 Euros and platters between 7 or so Euros. So where to go for my Lebanese meal? I have had good schawarmas at Babel on Kastanienalle, though it's been a while as I no longer live around the corner. For a time I liked Habibi with two locations in Schoeneberg (on Akazienstrasse and a few blocks north at Winterfeldplatz), but they microwave the bread and the last schawarma I had there (a few months back) tasted of nothing. Nothing. How a sandwich doused with tahini and garlic sauce can taste of nothing, I do not know, but I won't be back. So this time around, I did a simple google search for "best schawarma Berlin" and came across another blog, listing one person's opinions on the best hummus, falafel, and schawarma in town. It seemed a good a tip as any and so I set out with a fellow schwarma-lover to see what Maroush near Kottbusser Tor had to offer. We were not disappointed. It may have helped that we arrived just before the lunch rush, but our chicken schawarmas were as good as any I've had in Berlin. The sandwiches were stuffed to capacity, doused with delicious garicky tahini sauce, and in my case extra pickled turnips in place of French fries (I know lots of people like this, but I can't seem to get behind potatoes in my schawarma). Maroush's schawarma's are a little greasy, but as my friend pointed out, this isn't out of the ordinary. Still, I've had lighter and, in my opinion, better schawarmas in the past, albeit not in Berlin. Having somewhat limited capacity these days (growing fetus, etc.) I couldn't quite finish my lunch, but was still full hours later. Maroush's chicken schawarma would make an ideal late night, alcohol-absorbing snack. My main issue with Maroush? The place could use a thorough cleaning. The bathroom wasn't so bad - I was actually pretty excited to see that they have one as many Imbiss-type places do not. A peek into the kitchen on my way back from the bathroom didn't send me running, but it wasn't all that pretty either. Mostly though, the dining area is just dingy - washing the walls and removing the thick layer of dust from the jars of preserved vegetables that line the walls and make up most of the place's decor would do wonders. Maroush Adalbertstrasse 93

Laos: man kann nur seufzen

My expectations were pretty low heading into Lemon Leaf (Southeast Asian food being almost universally blah in Berlin to put it mildly). Still, all those positive reviews on Qype. Maybe this place really was above average. Sigh. Lemon Leaf markets itself as an Indochinese restaurant - Indochina being the name for the French colony made up of today's Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The folks behind Lemon Leaf have thrown in Thailand because people like Thai food. I could get worked up about that - focus people! - but if the food was really good, who would care? As I've mentioned before, food doesn't stop at political borders, so there is plenty of what we might know as Thai food in traditional Laotian cuisine. But the food's not really good and that, of course, is the problem. The menu is nice enough, with most dishes labeled for one of the four cuisines on offer. Also, most dishes are available with your choice of tofu or preferred meat. I kind of hate this and wish the chef would just decide which protein is best for which dish, but (again) this isn't the main problem here. We stuck to the Laotian offerings and shared a papaya salad, chicken and bean sprouts in a nondescript sauce with sticky rice, and crispy duck and vegetables with basil and jasmine rice. I suppose I should have written down the names of the dishes we ordered, but none of them are worth you tracking them down, so it's not much of a loss. Sigh. I guess the food at Lemon Leaf is a tiny, baby step above what you find at your average Asia-Imbiss (a sort of fast food snack bar common throughout Germany selling cheap stir-fries for little money. Think neon lights and greasy noodles). The rice (both sticky and jasmine) is well cooked at Lemon Leaf for one thing. As are the vegetables - obviously cooked to order so that they are just tender and not at all greasy or soggy. I guess that's not nothing. But the flavors are really muted - there's just no punch or complexity of flavors at all, in any of the dishes. Everything is overly sweet or bland. This is, in my experience, always the case in Berlin when it comes to Southeast Asian food. I'd love to be proven wrong (and yes, I've been to "Thai Park" in Preussen Park). (Angkor Wat was the closest I've come to finding an exception here.) At the end of the meal, I asked the waiter where the cook(s) were from and he said one was half-Lao, half Thai and the other was Thai - specially hired to cook the food that Berliners so love. I wasn't trying to suggest that the food had been bad (it's not his fault), but he seemed to sense something. He became a little sad and said, they can't cook authentic Laotian or Thai food because the locals don't like it. I just don't believe that. Lemon Leaf is in Friedrichshain for one thing - an area full of educated Germans (many of whom have, as Germans do, traveled) and expats. This is not to say that all educated Germans and expats care, because I know that they don't. Most of the Germans I know are thrilled to eat this dumbed-down food and view anything with coconut milk like manna from heaven. But that's not the same as saying that they would turn up their noses as really good, complex Southeast Asian food. I know many of them wouldn't. Sigh.

Korea: ein Loch in die Wand

The internet is full of very positive reviews of Arirang, along with a handful of posts lamenting the dingyness of the restaurant. So I was a little wary heading off to lunch, but at least on the day we were there, the place seemed perfectly clean. Make no mistake, though - this is a true hole-in-the-wall - the furniture and decor is absolutely functional and half the tables are separated from the kitchen only by a counter. Service is fine, but none of the three people working their seemed to speak much German, which makes pleasantries difficult. No matter - we were there for the food. It was a cold day and we were hungry, so we settled on a set menu for two (larger menus are available for three and four diners): kimchi soup (Kimchi-Jigae), fried mandoo (Korean dumplings), and beef bulgogi for about 25 Euros. As a pickle fiend, the highlight of the meal was the banchan or relish tray (for lack of a better English expression) that came with the meal: kimchi, of course, along with pickled cucumbers, a sort of kimchi shredded radish, caramelized potatoes, and preserved bean sprouts - all housemade, I think. The kimchi soup was my favorite of the three menu items - rich, pleasantly mellow kimchi flavor with good chunks of tofu and some slices of pork. Oddly, though, we got one bowl to share - not a problem as I was dining with my husband and Arirang isn't a likely spot for a formal business lunch, but there are plenty of reasons someone would prefer to have their own small bowl. The mandoo, alas, were nowhere near as good as the soup. They were very probably the industrial frozen ones we can all buy at Asian grocery stores, but mostly they just tasted fried. I've had lots of better mandoo in my day. The bulgogi was pretty solid. Not life-changing, but it tasted good and it's easily four servings of meat. Arirang is bare bones, so you won't get a plate or anything fancy to eat your meat on. I have no idea if this is a cultural difference, but the pieces of meat are fairly large and perching them on the small bowls of rice isn't always easy. I'm perfectly happy dining without table clothes under neon lights, but plates don't seem excessive to me. Still, the food at Arirang was good (and not at all dumbed down or dressed up for the locals) and if I lived nearby, I would definitely go back. I'm not sure I would trek across town for it. I may however, check out their sister restaurant, Ho Do Ri, which is in my neighborhood. I'm already craving kimchi again... PS: I do know that North and South Korea are separate countries....but I was specifically forbidden from trying to access the North Korean embassy by my paranoid husband who may have watched too much 30 Rock. In any case, while there are no doubt regional differences, the two cuisines are supposedly quite similar, with the North having a somewhat milder cuisine...and these days, less food in general.... Arirang Seestrasse 106

Jordanien (sozusagen)

Dinner at Casalot was a Seinfeldian experience, which is not to say that the food was bad, but sometimes awful service, even for those of us who really are most interested in how the food tastes, can be what you remember of a meal. I found Casalot by googling "Jordian restaurant Berlin" - it's the first search result that appears, but I still wasn't certain that it was actually a Jordanian restaurant. There's no mention of Jordan at all on the restaurant's website and who knows what tricks Google is up to. But then I found this little review of Casalot from the Berliner Zeitung last year, which sings the praises of Casalot's mansaf "the Jordanian national dish." So it had to be Jordanian, right? But a few weeks later when I was arranging to meet two friends at Casalot for dinner, I happened to notice that mansaf was no longer on the menu posted on the website. I called to find out (1) if Casalot is a Jordanian restaurant and (2) what happened to the mansaf? Casalot turns out to be run by Palestians, but if you know your Middle East geography, you know that Palestine and Jordan are neighbors. And of course, political borders do not usually mean that the food eaten on either side of the line is dramatically different. Besides, as the man on the phone told me, "Palestinians and Jordanians are the same." There may be different thoughts on this statement by some Palestinians and Jordanians, but according to Al Jazeera, Palestinians do make up about half of Jordan's population. And perhaps most importantly, a Palestinian restaurant serving the Jordanian national dish is the closest I was going to get to eating Jordanian food in Berlin. Except for the little issue of mansaf having been removed from the menu! This turned out to be a non-issue, however, because when I asked about it, the nice man on the other end of line told me that they would make it for me if I wanted. I wanted.

I'll try to spare you the boring details, but let's just say after devouring an order of mazza (often spelled mezze), which were, by the way, truly excellent - the best I've had in Berlin, our mansaf (the entire reason we were dining at Casalot) failed to materialize. This was a huge service failure on the part of the restaurant (Casalot is not a hole in the wall - there are table clothes - and a basic level of competent service is to be expected.) First, they should have known we were expecting mansaf when I arrived and gave my name as I had ordered the mansaf when I made the reservation. At at least two other points during the meal, I attempted to tell the waiter that we had pre-ordered mansaf, but both times I was interrupted and brusquely told that the food was coming. Not wanting to be pushy, I assumed the kitchen was slow and didn't push the issue until we had waited 30 minutes after finishing our mazza. The waitstaff realized their mistake quickly and what had been odd and surly serviced became annoyingly gushing and over-attentive service. There's not much a restaurant can do at this point except comp (part of) your bill or offer free drinks. We were immediately offered a bottle of very good Lebanese wine and water for the non-drinkers. I think they might have comped the drinks we had already ordered, but they didn't. After another short while, the mansaf made it's appearance. At this point, we weren't even really hungry anymore, and I'm sorry to say, after all this fuss, I wasn't too thrilled with the mansaf. I think much of this had to do with lack of appetite and frustration with the overall experience, but I also think for my non-Jordanian palate, I would have liked something more. Mansaf is lamb served on rice with a sauce made from fermented dried yogurt (it's a originally Bedouin dish, I believe, and the nomads had to dry their yogurt so they could travel with it. You can see the hard lumps of yogurt here if you're interested). Anyway, the meat wasn't bad and the sauce was really quite good, but I was missing vegetables or pomegranate seeds or something to give a little more contrast. Still, I'd be game for giving mansaf another go under less irritating circumstances. And in all fairness, none of the tables around us seemed to be experiencing any service issues. So if you find yourself at Casalot, stick to the menu (or just get the very filling mazza) and the Lebanese wine. Casalot Claire-Waldoff-Strasse 5