My PIC and I are finally back in Berlin after various delays, and I’ll be posting noteworthy meals for the next two months.
First up: Good Thai down the road from us: we split som tam, summer rolls with shrimp, and yum nua. Clearly still operating on jet-lag brain, so we totes blanked on ordering the som tam & beef salad “Thai spicy.” Thankfully, the som tam had a nice kick, but the yum nua did not. I liked it anyway, and the summer rolls were heavy on the holy basil. Bonus in my book
Really nice nabe place with very reasonable prices.
You MUST visit Nil in Hamburg. It’s my favorite restaurant there, although that designation is pretty meaningless as I’ve not had dinner elsewhere in Hamburg in decades
My 90+ year old cousin lives a little outside of HH, and we visit her every summer - pretty much just to have an excuse to eat at Nil. I’ve not had a single bad meal there once.
Lunch/snack of midye, a popular street food from Istanbul. Mussels stuffed with tomato rice and a lot of fresh lemon squeezed all over. Perfect size
While this delight can be found at the local farmers market (Kollwitzplatz) we like to visit on Saturdays, the stand is actually run by a Turkish restaurant in Kreuzberg, Mardin. Their Adana kebab with pistachios is out of this world, and it is safe to say it’ll make another appearance in this thread at some point
We usually try to get different flavors so we can share them all, but the Sicilian pistachio is sofa king good we both had to get it. The other two were mango & coconut with black sesame, and rhubarb raspberry with mascarpone
We ate at Nil in Hamburg when we were there some 6 years ago. We probably went there because you had been writing about it back then. Don’t remember what we had, but we all liked it.
Yeah, probably. I always recommend it to any visitors to HH bc I really love it… and it’s the only place I know there
Glad you enjoyed yourselves. It’s pretty straightforward, non-fussy cuisine with excellent local & seasonal ingredients. I don’t need many bells & whistles anymore, just good food
Went back to the Georgian place we discovered last year, in lieu of trying a new one a bit further away. It’s hotter than hell here, so we’ve been trying to avoid any travel on public transportation, which is often only theoretically air-conditioned.
Tsomi is smack-dab on Kollwitzplatz in the middle of Prenzlauer Berg, and hugely popular. Place was packed to the rafters on a Tuesday night after all - a hot AF Tuesday night.
The steaming temps were also the reason we forewent ordering khachapuri this time around, despite my PIC’s love for it, and ordered the Tsomi platter instead - a mix of their appetizers. A large amount of food for a very reasonable 29€. The beets, cucumber salad & the chicken salad were my favorite. I actually make a better eggplant with walnut sauce than they do
Lunch at Mr. Hai. It may not be the greatest sushi in town, but the lunch deal of 12.80€ for a reliably very good miso soup, 3 plates from the conveyor belt (you can order fresh a la carte as well) & jasmine tea is hard to beat.
Plus it’s a bit of a tradition for us - we’ve been going here for well over a decade, and it’s nice that the sushi dude still recognizes us every summer, and knows what we love.
Steak frites at our favorite lil French bistro, Les Valseuses.
The menu is pretty small: 3 entrées that are always available – namely escargots, duck rillettes, and beef tartare, plus usually one entrée special & two main specials.
The rillettes is better shared between more than two peeps, so we opted for one of the specials – grilled mackerel filet with capers, dill-fennel salad & a lovely remoulade. The fish was cooked perfectly.
Always on the menu, however, is steak frites. You can choose between the traditional entrecôte or filet, and your choice of green peppercorn, tarragon butter, or blue cheese sauce.
We got the entrecôte perfectly MR & the filet perfectly rare, green peppercorn sauce pour moi, tarragon butter for my PIC. The frites are fried in duck fat and are pure perfection: hot, crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside. They also stayed crispy until we were basically done with our meat orgy. A salad with a tangy mustard vinaigrette complements the meal, and the Gris de Grenache went well with all the things
This place has been around for at least a decade, and it’s easy to understand why.
When in Berlin, eat more of the foods you can’t get at home. More Georgian food for brunch/lunch at the place we were too lazy to discover a few days ago, but happened to be in the nabe today. The badrijani was better than what we had at Tsomi.
Met up with friends at the 10th anniversary of Bite Club, a local street food event yesterday. It was pretty busy, but we got there early like good middle-aged peeps will, and so the lines weren’t terrible just yet. We immediately spotted an Argentinian booth where we grabbed a bbq platter: rib-eye, chorizo, sirloin, tater, chimichurri, grilled tomato, sauce. Seemed like a good start. Was.
our friend and her boo got some Pakistani stuff I didn’t photograph and forgot what it was. We were hoping to get a buttermilk fried chicken burger or pan-fried dumplings as our second course, but both booths had lines around the block, whereas an Indian booth offering dosas was practically deserted. Unrightfully so, as the dosa with tandoori chicken ordered EXTRA spicy was a flavor party in our mouths.
At the risk of repeating myself, we went back to our favorite pizza place last night, a very low-key trattoria run by Neapolitan punks. It was the perfect meal to soak up too many beers with friends
Tried a new, fancy Japanese “brasserie” in our hood, mostly bc the place we wanted to visit was ready to close. A very late dinner of hamachi & toro nigiri, beef tataki, salmon carpaccio, and crispy oyster mushrooms. Outstanding service & very good fish.
