“Brunch,” I was told my first day in town, “is big in Berlin.”
Having just come from New York, a city where weekend brunch is practically a religion, I almost snorted, wondering how different or striking this meal could possibly be in Berlin.
As my host led me down the cobblestoned streets of the city’s fashionable Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, however, I quickly realized my folly …
It only took about a week into my visit to Germany but suddenly, there it was: My massive craving for a bowl of hot noodle soup.
Good thing I was in Berlin — I’d been told before getting here that there’s good Vietnamese food to be had in this city. Vietnamese immigrants, after all, have been a fixture in Berlin since as early as the 1950s, when East Germany began extending invitations to North Vietnamese to come over for training programs.
Where to go? All signs pointed to a spot in East Berlin’s Lichtenberg neighborhood named Dong Xuan Center …
I’m a big believer in eating in red-light districts.
In Asia at least, that’s where you can often find good food that’s fairly cheap in settings that are open deep into the night.
It turns out that this sometimes holds true even for gentrified neighborhoods that once were red-light districts — at least that’s what I discovered during a recent jaunt to Frankfurt’s Bornheim, a city district once called “Das lustige Dorf” (“The Merry Village”) because of the evening hotbed that it was more than 100 years ago …
I used to think there was nothing better than waking up in the morning to the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen.
And then I woke up one afternoon from a deliciously languorous nap, having fallen asleep with a book on my chest, to the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen.
The bacon was just the first sign of a terrific meal ahead. What was on the menu? Kasseler mit puree und kraut — smoked cured pork neck with sweet buttery mashed potatoes and bacon-inflected sauerkraut …
Of course I landed in Frankfurt hungry. Starving, really.
Not to mention exhausted, grumpy — and did I mention famished? Which is, as you might guess, not the best combination.
With the goal being to feed me — and fast — we decided to step into a place that popped up on a road nearby. Now, as someone who tends to like researching places before I pick up a fork there, I wondered, would this random choice near the woods of Raunheim, Germany, be OK?
The sound of its name — Bembelsche, which means jug of apple wine, the local specialty — was promising though. And schnitzel was on the menu.
So hey, we thought, this can’t be bad …