So tomorrow morning I’m off to SXSW again. Last year I said I’d be reporting from the scene, but got so weirded out by culture shock that I never got around to it, so this time I’m not making any promises. I’ll probably be uploading some food reports to Dishola, and I’ll undoubtedly expand on them here, especially if I find some great new places, but usually the nights of music leave me so exhausted and depressed with the sheer volume of mediocre stuff that I lack any enthusiasm for writing about it afterwards. Or that’s what happened last year.
Actually, one of the more interesting SXSW-related activities is happening before the event, in the form of a blog discussing the impact of technology on the record biz. Even if you don’t follow some of the more intricate details, you’ll be able to pick up on how dire things are even for those heroic little guys who’re supposed to be profiting from the dinosaurs’ malaise. And this year I’m actually on a panel, or, rather, I’m conducting one of the live interviews with an old hero of mine, Joe Boyd, who’s probably produced at least one of your all-time favorite records, even if you haven’t heard it yet.
I’ll also be headed off to Marin County (got a super-cheap ticket) to pay my respects to the about-to-vanish Village Music, but unless I win the lottery in Texas offering my respects is about all I’m going to be able to do. But I’ll be seeing some folks from the Well, as well as some old friends from when I lived there. Then it’ll be back to Texas for a couple of days, and back here at the end of March.
And a couple of days after that, you just know I’ll be pissed off at Berlin again.
There it goes: another piece of Berlin history is biting the dust.
That’s right, folks: by the time I get back from the States, the Tränenpalast will be no more. Apparently Deutsche Bahn has decided that this memory of the old East-West border has to be demolished immediately, the easier to excise the memory of what the building used to be.
I know for a lot of people, the Tränenpalast was a curiously-named entertainment venue, one which, if the experience my friend Gary Lucas had when he was booked there a few years ago is anything to go by, was horribly managed. In fact, practically from the day it opened in that incarnation, I heard sordid tales about the management, and the new managers didn’t seem to be any better than the first ones.
My first time there, though, wasn’t exactly for entertainment. The building’s name, “Palace of Tears,” came from its use as the processing terminal for Western visitors leaving East Berlin on their way back home. In retrospect, this seems like an odd name: Friedrichstr. station was an international checkpoint (the other being Checkpoint Charlie, further down Friedrichstr.), not a German-German one (which were scattered all over town), so the story that it saw the tearful separation of families who had come over to visit doesn’t hold water unless these families were from countries besides Germany.
When I made my first visit to East Berlin, it was in the company of a guy who apparently had raised some red flags at Checkpoint Charlie, and had suffered a cavity search on his last time over. He decided it might be easier to try Friedrichstr., and indeed it was, so my first view of East Berlin was the Admiralspalast theater. We quickly headed on to the Pergamon Museum, Alexanderplatz, and Frankfurter Allee, where we marvelled at the grandiose Russian-style apartment buildings.
But our ultimate destination was Prenzlauer Berg, where we met up with a guy named Norman. Norman was part of a group of vegetarians who met occasionally in East Berlin with some folks from the West, including some British and American soldiers, who were also vegetarians, for big dinners. Apparently (by which I mean maybe, see below), the day before, Norman had seen one of these guys on the street and waved to him. The morning of the day we met him, he’d been awoken by the Stasi secret police and interrogated for six hours. By the time we met up with him, Norman was a wreck.
Our solution to this was to get him as drunk as possible. This was also the solution to another problem: the 25 Marks one had to exchange one-for-one at the border. Eastmarks were worth nothing, and there was nothing much you could buy with them, but you weren’t allowed to take any back with you, either. To burn them up, we bought Norman dinner and found a bar where we drank ourselves silly. Finally, it was almost midnight, the time by which we had to be out of East Berlin, and we were just about out of money. We slipped Norman our spare change, and headed to the checkpoint in the building which is now called the Tränenpalast. Norman was still traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Stasi, and was begging us to find him a black Jewish woman to marry. “That way, if the state tries to keep us apart, I can charge them with racism and anti-Semitism!” We tried to explain that black Jews of any gender were thin on the ground, let alone ones who might be inclined to marry him, but he told us we were lying, covering up for our unwillingness to help him.
On the one hand, Norman was being ludicrous, but on the other, I never forgot this rather intimate view into life in East Berlin. The guy I went over with later published a rather icky book called Once Upon a Time in the East, detailing the wacky fun he and his friends had had travelling in the East Bloc before the Wall came down, eating bad — but cheap! — vegetarian food in places like Romania and Czechoslovakia and generally behaving like the boorish British tourists they were. Norman’s story was in there, too, along with an interesting postscript. When the border to Hungary opened up, Norman was one of the first to leave East Berlin, and travelled the long way around, through Czechoslovakia, Austria, West Germany, and then back to West Berlin, a trip of hundreds of miles to achieve a journey from Prenzlauer Berg to Schöneberg. But once he was there, he began acting very strangely, and there are some among that circle who think, today, that Norman was a Stasi agent keeping track of them, and that it’s not impossible that the whole interrogation story he told us that day had been made up.
I have no idea, but I do think of Norman, who was last heard of living with his mother back in Prenzlauer Berg, when I walk past the Tränenpalast.
Or, as with so many other things here, maybe I should put that in the past tense. Once again, an uncomfortable souvenir of Berlin’s past is extirpated. In two years, no doubt, there’ll be a little pocket park there (to compensate for the one on the other side of the station, on which rose yet another untenanted office building), or maybe a Tränenpalast Museum sponsored by Deutsche Bahn, where the story the exhibits tell might not jibe exactly with the memories a bunch of aging people seem to have of the reality. The Palast der Republik is pretty much down by now, the Tränenpalast is going down…What’s next?
On Sunday, one of the tabloids had a headline screaming that Deutsche Post is going to tear down the Fernsehturm. It’ll take a little more than the Berliner Kurier to convince me of this, but after what I’ve seen here, I’m not ruling it out, either.
First, I would like to make extra sure that readers of this blog realize that it has nothing to do with the dining-out column by the same name in the wretched Ex-Berliner magazine. It’s really not even worth wasting electrons on those people and their amazingly myopic view of Berlin’s anglophone communities, but it probably is worth highlighting their astonishing lack of originality.
Those who are interested in my dining-out experiences here should a) wait until I can afford doing it again and then b) check over at Dishola, the Austin-based experiment in restaurant blogging or whatever it is. I’m the official Berlin Editor over there, and I’ve really got to get some stuff up about Toca Rouge and that ramen place on Neue Schönhauser and a couple of other places I’m thinking would appeal to their readership.
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As promised some time ago, a new work by Nike, this one on Brunnenstr. near the park. Is this an hommage to Gaugin, or…?
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I’m headed to Texas and California via Paris for a couple of weeks, starting in a week, and walked over to Hauptbahnhof recently to buy my ticket to Paris and see if I could get beaned by a piece of falling steel so I could sue Deutsche Bahn and get myself free tickets for life. I did manage to accomplish one of those goals, but it was the one that cost me money, not the one that cost them money. Whatever: I’m leaving this place for a while, and that always feels good unless I’m headed to someplace even worse like Frankfurt/Main.
At any rate, I was amused by a rather ambitious currywurst budde over there which calls itself Berliner-Curry.de. Around the name are listed cities: New York, Dubai, Paris, and so on. Interesting; an entrepreneur actually attempting to franchise Berlin currywurst around the world? That actually could be a winner (although not in Dubai unless the sausages were beef). Naturally, as soon as I got home I hit the URL, and was disappointed, as you no doubt will be. It is emblematically Berlinish, though, to hop on a trend without really understanding it. I remember years ago when a new office supply company opened here in Mitte calling itself Papyrus.com. Naturally, they hadn’t registered the URL, and didn’t even have a website. But that dot-com stuff was trendy, right?
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One thing you can always say about Berlin is it’s a really safe city. Violent crime here is almost unknown in most places, and I’ve only been burgled once, which was pretty much my landlord’s fault. But that’s not to say there isn’t an undercurrent of anger here which blossoms forth every now and again in unpleasant ways. Currently, the trend seems to be throwing paving stones (easily dug out of the sandy soil here with a pen knife) through windows. Just in the past couple of days, I’ve seen smashed windows at the hookah bar on Chausseestr. and Tieckstr. (although this is probably just the tip of a larger story involving the huge number of these places and shops to supply them which have sprung up virtually overnight: do people really enjoy sitting around sipping sweet tea and smoking perfumed tobacco if they’re not Arabs?), at the huge SAP software company building on the corner of Rosenthaler Str. and Gipsstr. (where you can see the place they dug the stones right in front of the building), and at the former Beate Uhse porn shop on Rosenthaler Str. This last suddenly sprouted some weird art-like installation in the windows almost within minutes of the Uhse folks pulling out, and it was apparently part of some viral marketing scheme by one of the game box companies — I’ve lost track of Playstations and Nintendos and so on, but one of them has put up fake street art, opened a fake art gallery on Torstr., and now this. Not only did the windows go, the bricks were still there when I walked past, and someone was filming it.
I have to admit, I understand how street artists can get irked by this sort of thing, because the paper art with the URL was just bad enough that it stood out as fake. It was as annoying as the ad campaign for the new Toyota auto which has — and I’m not exaggerating here — taken up about 95% of all advertising space in this city for most of this week, and which will, if there’s any justice, disappear tomorrow when the car is actually introduced. The Toyota campaign is yet another one which presupposes the utter stupidity of the consumer, the “Hey dumbass, buy this” attitude that’s at the basis of so much German advertising, as opposed to the “You’re clever enough to want this” approach the Brits pioneered and the Americans eventually figured out. Trouble is, there aren’t enough paving stones to take this one out.
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Yes, I know Berlin is changing, but… One night not very long ago, I was walking down Invalidenstr. and there was cheesy pink light streaming off a ginormous disco ball inside the staid walls of the old DDR post office. A couple of weeks later, I saw that Volkswagen was staging an event there. Now, when I first moved here, that was my local post office, and I’ve (naturally, because it’s what one does at the post office in Germany) stood in lines there many a day, admiring the strange metal sculpture on the polished marble walls. After Deutsche Post went private and the post office moved into a MacPaper outlet (I am not making this up, for those of you who don’t live here), the building was empty for a long, long time. But apparently it’s been rescued by a club which will give the lie to all those reports of hip! edgy! Berlin! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bangaluu! (Warning: cheezy handbag house music when you click the link). Opening a branch of this — or even an imitation of it — would soon empty Friedrichshain of hipsters, and the flights back to Williamsburg would be packed. I kept clicking links on that site out of sick fascination. And to think it’s right next door to where, many many years ago in the Paleolithic Era, the Technics Club was…
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And finally, the pictures to explain the headline. Some months ago, I posted a picture of some graffiti “artists” spray-painting the wall of the building next to me, which I have to walk past on my way to my front door. I thought they were done — surely it couldn’t get any more hideous than that — but they kept working at it until there were all sorts of horrible details: a little green head of some depressed-looking guy, a woman-robot…who knows what they thought they were doing? But they signed it and left their phone numbers, in case anyone else wanted their house desecrated.
Then, as I guess artistic collaborations do on occasion, this one went south, and one of the “artists” came back and obliterated his former partner’s work and re-did it to his own liking. Not only that, he also went to work on the wall next door to it, so now we have a diptych with the theme of the Berlin Wall. Now, just why someone would want to spray-paint a new Wall, I cannot tell you. In fact, besides the eyesore factor, the depression this horrible set of murals sets off in me every time I have to see it (which is, of course, every day) is hard to even verbalize. What is the point of this? Who on earth would pay someone to do it? And just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s the wall closest to the street:
And here’s the wall on the rear building:
There’s only one solution I can think of. The original Berlin Wall attracted graffiti artists from around the world. Not just the collection who did the stretch known as the East Side Gallery (which was all post-Wall anyway), but Keith Haring over by the Gropius-Bau, and the French guy who did all those heads that wound up in Wings of Desire on that stretch in Kreuzberg. So maybe Nike can come and stick a nude or two up on this “Wall” and make it that much less depressing to look at.
I still liked our wall better when it had a big billboard on it featuring the Puhdys shilling for Berliner Pilsner.
Some years ago, Berlin had the first of its Biennales. I went, looked, and wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal Europe, because that was my job at the time. A few weeks later, an art critic I knew from Philadelphia came through to check it out. I caught her leaving the Postführamt, where the show was, and asked her what she’d thought. “Aaah,” she sneered. “A lot of one-liners.” An apt description, I thought. “Except…well, there was this piece by this Portugese guy…”
Oh, yes. It was called Kitsune, and it made me confront a lot of my ideas about art at that time. Basically, it was what’s called a video installation, although, unlike most video installations, which can be seen for as long or short as you feel like in order to get the idea, this one was linked to a narrative, which meant you really had to sit through the whole thing. It was worth it. The visual was fairly static: Japanese mountains, over which fog was coming and going. The text was read by two Japanese radio actors, in Japanese, and there were English subtitles. The story was simple: two old men are waiting out the rain in a teahouse, and, although both are rather shy, eventually they begin to talk, and wind up telling each other ghost stories. I loved it.
And because I’d loved it and said so in print, and was apparently one of the few people who reviewed that exhibition who didn’t zero in on the super-trendy but empty stuff there, the artist, a guy named João Penalva, contacted me about getting a copy of the review. He lives in London most of the time, and one of his dealers, Volker Diehl, is in Berlin, so he’s here from time to time. That’s where I met him almost exactly three years ago, at the opening of another video work, Bahnai. He’s short and round and has a great sense of humor, as I discovered when we had lunch at the Vietnamese place down the street.
So when I got an invitation to the DAAD Galerie for the opening of his latest piece, The Roar of Lions, on Feb. 2, I made a note to go see it. I was extremely busy at the moment getting some book proposals ready, so I didn’t make the opening, and although I used the invitation as a bookmark for what I was reading at the time, I’m ashamed to say it took an e-mail from him asking if I’d seen it, and, if so, what I thought, to get me off my butt to go see it. I used to have several friends here who were always up for gallery-hopping but they’ve all moved, so I don’t keep up as much as I’d like. But I found time to walk down to Zimmerstr. yesterday to take a look.
It’s another amazing piece. It starts with a couple of flashlights moving around in the dark, and then cuts to a scene of a frozen-over lake, the Grunewaldsee here in Berlin. The text this time is in Mandarin Chinese, which, as with Kitsune, means you have to pay attention to the subtitles. This time the story isn’t so easily described, nor do I want to give any spoilers, but at the start the narrator has just witnessed a bloody car accident involving a woman and a girl, and is talking to the policeman at the scene about what he saw. The policeman thanks him, tells him there were other witnesses, and checks his papers, perhaps a little closely. At this point, a note of dread enters the story, although you don’t quite know why. It gets worse when he gets home: unlocking the door, he finds the same policeman and a guy in civilian clothes inside his apartment, although how they got in he can’t figure. The dread gets a lot thicker at that point, in part because of what happens, but in part, also, because we can’t tell where this story is taking place or what the stakes are.
Meanwhile, we are watching the scene on the ice, as ordinary folks are walking on the ice, some (but only a few) skating, and a lot of them are out with their dogs, who are not at their best slipping around. Imperceptably, the sort of brownish-green of the video acquires more and more color, to the point where someone in a red jacket really stands out. But as the story being told gets odder and more infused with fear, the colors start bleaching out again, something Penalva also did with Bahnai. But the story has gotten so gripping by this part that you’re likely not to notice this right away, and it also undergoes a complete metamorphosis in its last few lines so that by the time the credits roll, you’re even more unsure of what you’ve just sat through than you could have imagined.
Suffice it to say that the walk home was completely different than the walk to the gallery. It was the same street (Friedrichstr.), but the experience I’d just been through had changed it utterly. The Roar of Lions was done while Penalva was here in Berlin with a DAAD grant, and if it reflects his experience here, then that might well explain my reaction. There’s also the disconnect between the images of the people out walking and playing on the ice and the narrative overlaying it, much of which occurs in the narrator’s small room. I’d really have to see it again to say anything more intelligent about it, but there’s one thing I can say:
If you get the chance, go see this. The gallery is open from 11 until 6 every day except Sunday, the piece is 37 minutes long, and screenings are every 45 minutes. The show closes on Mar. 10, so you’ve got two weeks. I’ll probably go again, so if anyone wants to join me, let me know. Just don’t expect any light-hearted banter afterwards.
Just a couple of random things for those who aren’t at the Berlinale…
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A friend who works with a company here in Berlin that produces trade magazines, several of them for the food industry, was over the other day. “That bread you get in the bakeries here,” he was saying, “you know they don’t bake that on the premises, right?” Well, that hardly takes a genius; most bakeries don’t have the room to mix, form, proof, and bake bread. No, of course it’s brought in from somewhere else in what readers of a certain age might recognize as Brown N Serve condition and finished in the tiny ovens in the bakery. “Yeah, right,” he contined, “but here’s the really weird part. Do you know where that bread starts out?” In some factory somewhere, I suppose. “You’re right — but the factory is in China. They fly the bread in, frozen, and it gets distributed to an intermediate point, and then it gets thawed and delivered to the bakeries.”
I’m not passing this along as gospel, although I suspect it might be true for some of the chains. I’ve often known I was approaching Berlin on the train, for instance, because of a huge Thobens Bakeries facility just outside of Potsdam, but I don’t know what they actually do there. Anyone else have info on this? It’d help explain why the bread here is so bad — the independent bakery in Berlin is virtually extinct — but it would also open up a new market for German bakers: it would be just as easy to re-heat this stuff in ovens in America or Japan as it is to do it here. And you could market it as “authentic German bread.”
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Speaking of magazines, a friend passed this article along. Ho-hum, another magazine startup. But…Vanity Fair isn’t just any magazine. It’s hard to say if the Spiegel article is tongue-in-cheek — although, like the country it’s published in, it’s not known for a sense of humor — but there are some rather astounding things in it. Like this quote: “And rumors abound that Gruner + Jahr is already working on a magazine in case Vanity Fair is successful. The working title sounds like something Poschardt would come up with: Neues Deutschland or New Germany.” Ummm, I know Germans are expert at forgetting their history, but did no one notice that this was the name of the house organ of the East German government? I mean, I can go to the DDR Museum and buy a replica copy of the first issue for €1.50.
Not to mention the folly of doing this as a weekly, doing it as a weekly with a tiny staff, and running a picture of Till Schweiger with a goat on the cover of the first issue. Till Schweiger with his shirt off, sure, but…a goat??
Read it and weep.
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Which is pretty much what I did this afternoon while trying to figure out if I have enough in the bank for a round-trip train ticket to Paris. I probably do, but when you go to the Deutsche Bahn travel information page and try to book the ticket, you’re met with a link that says “Unknown Tariff Abroad.” Click it, and you get this message:
“For the most important foreign cities (e.g. Vienna, Amsterdam, Zurich) fares are available.
“For your requested connection fares are unfortunately not available.”
So Deutsche Bahn is still fighting the Franco-Prussian War and we, the customers, get the benefit.
All I seem to have to do is to save up a few tiny items for one of these collections of trivia and the very next day I find a bunch more. Almost immediately after pushing the “publish” button on the last batch, I was walking around the ‘hood and found a new Nike painting. But that’ll have to wait…
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Meanwhile, it’s that time again, and for the first year in recent memory the Potsdamer Platz public transportation is open for the Berlinale, Berlin’s once-mighty film festival. Two things I never do is go to the Berlinale and read the pitiful excuse for an English-language magazine here, the Ex-Berliner, but I do get a kick out of their sadsack music editor, David Strauss, and he’s gotten the no doubt unpaid job of blogging the Berlinale for them. It could be fun to read, and so if you’re interested, I suggest you click here.
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Last year, out of nowhere, I got a two-Euro coin that looked like this:
The building is the Holstentor in Lübeck, pretty much the symbol of that city, and seeing it on the back of these special coins was, in fact, the only way to see it during much of last year, because the real thing was covered by scaffolding. Just why Germany would choose to change its coinage design only a few years into introducing it I had no idea, but last night I was in some seedy dive or another, and got this in change:
It took me a bit of surfing around to find out that this is Schwerin Castle, representing the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and to find an explanation, rendered in the stiffest possible English translation. Basically, the various Federal states of Germany take over the annual presidency of the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, and get their own coins as a perk. Germany’s the only country doing this, which is further proof that a lot of the Euro system was designed by them. Why else would we have a 20-cent, instead of a 25-cent, coin, not to mention the tiny, confusing 2-centers?
Of course, what they’re really really good for, these special €2 coins, is making cashiers — especially outside of Germany — hand you your change back and tell you it’s not good.
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Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of “French” cafes around town? There must be a dozen of them which’ve sprung up in the past six months, particularly around trendy areas like Weinbergsweg, Kollwitzplatz, and so on. What’s really weird, though, is that there’s nothing particularly French about anything but the wine they offer (and that’s usually not so hot), and the ones that pretend to have a little deli section don’t seem to have a clue what French food is. One I’ve got my eye on, though, is just down the street from me on Torstr. In the former Döner Kebap joint that had the weird poem about children being the future of the world on its wall, someone’s opening something called Bandol, and they’ve been installing vintage meat lockers and a blackboard wall for writing the menu, plus diner-y chrome stools — and two huge TV monitors above the door. Or that’s what it looks like from the street. We’ll see (if “we” can afford it, that is) what it turns out to be. Meanwhile, though, to date it looks like “French” is the new “Mexican.”
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Places We Won’t Be Dining: Spotted on Marienburger Str.: Pizza Pimp.
First off, the reaction to my last post was very interesting: I got an e-mail from David Kamp, the author of The United States of Arugula, thanking me for the “review,” and noting that, as he mentions in the book’s introduction, there were threads of the story which he just couldn’t wedge in to the narrative as he was telling it. As an example — also mentioned in the introduction — he cites the history of Chinese cooking in America, which isn’t mentioned at all.
He’s right: once you start a story, it goes where it wants to go, and if it’s going to be readable, you have to make sure there aren’t too many digressions. And, as Kamp said in his note, both Edna Lewis and John Thorne lie outside the narrative he was writing. (He also noted that he’d eaten at Gage & Tollner under Lewis’ regime, but, unlike me, his table had gotten a visit from the grand lady herself, checking up on things. I am officially jealous.) As for Raymond Sokolov, he tried to get an interview with him, but they kept missing each other. This kind of thing happens, too.
As for me, I told him that this piece, like pretty much every post on this blog, was written and edited in an hour or less, which is a discipline I maintain in case I ever wind up with a serious writing career again. And in my case, I left out one of the threads of my argument, which was why I’d mentioned Bill Bruford’s book Heat at the top of the post: that besides the Food Network honky-tonk I mentioned, the other current trend seems to be towards a kind of connoisseurship that takes the ability to make good food out of the hands of ordinary people, be it through the kind of perfectionism Mario Battali practices, or the sous-vide fad or the weirdo-cuisine trend of El Bulli and so on.
Finally, Kamp mentioned that he was familiar with my writing, because of what he called “a morbid affliction of mine”.
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Not as morbid, of course, as this news about a German Chinese restaurant. It’s pretty obvious — well, pretty obvious to those of us who grew up around organized crime, anyway — that some of the “Asia” restaurant phenomenon here is about more than the bad food they serve. One guy I knew said it was an immigration scam: since Germans can’t tell one Asian from another, successive waves of workers pass through the restaurants using the same set of ID cards.
It’s obvious that something’s going on a lot of the time: people who remember the original White Trash Fast Food club on the corner by my house probably wondered why the Chinese motif, but that was because it was the Kaiser des Chinas restaurant before that, ornately decorated, with room after empty room. You never saw anyone in there, and the one person I knew who’d eaten there asked me if I had. When I told him no, he just said “Don’t.” (And he was German).
And then, one day, it just closed. It sat there, empty, for over a year. When Wally and his crew took it over, he showed me the kitchen. “These people left so quickly that they left the spices still measured out,” he said, pointing at a row of porcelain bowls with various powders and shriveled remnants in them. That was when I remembered having found a bunch of waiter’s wallets in the trash outside my house and wondering how in the world they’d gotten there. Still, nothing like this has happened here yet.
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Following up on the last set of crumbs, it should be noted that the good voters of Berlin actually went for the renaming of a stretch of Kochstr. as Rudi-Dutschke-Str. a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes the good guys do win, even if it’s just a bit of harmless symbolism.
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And following up on another crumb, I want to report that the Yum Mee bánh mi sandwich joint up at the top of Friedrichstr. is doing a pretty good job. I think the baguettes could be crisper, and they use some kind of margarine instead of the homemade mayo the place I was introduced to them in Honolulu used, and of course they don’t use shredded green chiles because they’re scared of frightening the Germans. Turned out the guy who actually puts your sandwich together speaks pretty accent-less American English, although he’s apparently never been there, and he interrogated me pretty thoroughly last time I was in there about my opinions on his product and my experiences with bánh mi in America. I told him he should add Vietnamese paté to the menu, but he wasn’t sure Germans would go for it — and he may be right. He is, however, about to add tiger prawns to the bánh mi side of the menu, which should be good. And, as lagniappe, as they say in Louisiana, his co-worker taught me how to say pho correctly. I’d been saying something like “phaw,” but it turns out to be more like “pheu.” Now if someone here would learn how to make that right…
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I recently discovered that there are so many refugees from Brooklyn’s hipster enclave, Williamsburg, here in Friedrichshain that they’re calling it Friedrichsburg, but that is not why Deutsche Post issued this stamp this year. Really.
, which I’d been wanting to read for some time. Foodie-ism, if I may be forgiven the term, is an interesting cultural phenomenon, and hardly restricted to the United States, although the degree of it there and the swiftness with which it arrived can be unnerving. Furthermore, this book ties in with a couple of others which have been getting a lot of discussion recently, most notably Bill Buford’s Heat, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, , the former of which I’ve read, the latter not. I did, however, read Pollan’s great article on “nutritionism” on Sunday, and suddenly a bunch of stuff came together in my head. Now let me see if I can disentangle it.
Kamp’s story begins with pioneers like James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne, each of whom had an individual way of awakening postwar Americans towards the possibilities of what they put on their tables. Beard’s approach was that of the hearty bon-vivant, a man’s man who wasn’t afraid to mess it up in the kitchen to produce good-tasting, all-American food, and who was particularly adept at that manliest of all pursuits, outdoor cooking — although he could also whip out a mean loaf of bread. Child and Claiborne, on the other hand, were lucky enough to come onto the scene just as America’s Francophilia was initiated by Jacqueline Kennedy’s love of French food and put into high gear by the restaurant at the French Pavillion of the 1964-65 World’s Fair on Flushing Meadows on Long Island. Child had taken cooking lessons in Paris while her husband was employed there and came back to the States determined to turn Americans onto this amazing cuisine. Claiborne, for his part, was reviewing restaurants for the New York Times and got to watch the phenomenon grow, eventually hooking up with one of the chefs who’d worked at the Fair, Pierre Franey, to make the Times’ food section the template for all other American newspapers’.
But the story really becomes important when the idea of eating well leaves the expensive restaurants and democratizes by merging — in California, of course — the impulse for fine cooking with the search for perfect ingredients, which latter was an inevitable product of the hippie-driven natural foods movement. The central figure for this was — and, really, still is — Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant, and the early chaos of that revolutionary place is a story which meets Kamp’s skills head-on. The intrigue, the musical beds, the drug use, and above all the titanic egos on display are perfect fodder for his Vanity Fair sensibility. Still, he never loses sight of the Big Picture, which was that ultimately this was a very, very successful movement, one which soon expanded past the California borders and into other states, and also expanded past the restaurant business into producers like Celestial Seasonings and Ben & Jerry’s and — especially — into the grocery business through America’s Whole Foods chain (which started in a building near my house in Austin which is now a laundromat).
The book’s momentum is such that you’re just swept away by the stories, and the skillful way Kamp joins them all together. The Food Network! Iron Chef! The Zagat Survey! Mark Miller! Tony Bourdain! It really is a great read. Except…
Except three really important figures in my own telling of this story are missing, two entirely, and one mentioned in passing for something I don’t consider his most important contribution to the story. And, in a really, really backhanded way, this also reflects on Pollan’s essay. Let me take these three missing persons in roughly chronological order.
First is Edna Lewis. who died last February at the age of 90. Mrs. Lewis was, unlike anyone else I can find in Kamp’s book, black, and she learned how to cook the traditional way from the traditional sources. Untraditionally, however, she left for New York at the age of 16, and, after a short time as a domestic, became known as a cook. She ruthlessly pursued that career, doing private catering work and finally taking over the kitchen at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, a hangout for all manner of lefties and jazz fans. She worked in several other restaurants, gave cooking lessons, and kept up her catering business, and in 1972, put out her first cookbook, The Edna Lewis Cookbook. Four years later came The Taste of Country Cooking
, which made her reputation. I finally caught up with her (in a manner of speaking) in the late ’80s, when she was brought in as executive chef to help rescue Brooklyn’s fabled Gage & Tollner steakhouse. I remember going there with a group which included two German friends who loved to cook, and on the way out, one of them bought one of her cookbooks — one I already had — at the cashier. “You won’t be able to make any of that back home,” I warned her. “I don’t care,” she said. “Anyone who takes this much care knows things I don’t know, and they’re things I can turn to my own uses. This is a very wise woman.” And she nailed it.
Edna Lewis was fanatical about two things: paying attention and having the perfect ingredients. Observing what you were doing while you were doing it so that it became part of you was obviously something she’d picked up from her mentors. And having perfect ingredients, although it was considered eccentric when she first came into the public’s notice, is now a sine qua non of any good cooking. It wasn’t so much that Mrs. Lewis brought Southern cooking north, but that she brought what she considered Southern practice public. And yet, she is ignored in Kamp’s book.
The second figure is Raymond Sokolov, mentioned in passing as the guy who replaced Craig Claiborne as the Times‘ restaurant reviewer. Which he was, at the beginning of his career. He also became, through his books and his column in, of all places, Natural History magazine, one of the first to make the point that there were a lot of native American ingredients and foodways which were vanishing thanks to Big Agriculture and the Interstate highway system. I’m not even sure his 1981 book, Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods is still in print. While writing other books, including a cook’s apprentice narrative which pre-dated Buford’s Heat by a couple of decades, The Saucier’s Apprentice
, which also serves as a practical guide to classic French sauces. But it was his sounding the klaxon about the “fading feast” which puts Sokolov in line for mention in this book, because people heard the alarm and responded to it, which has at least as much to do with the current greenmarket revival as Alice Waters and the guys in Union Square. (Due diligence: I worked under Sokolov during the years I was a cultural correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Europe, and had dinner with him once or twice, and although he can be a tough editor, I really like the guy).
The third missing figure here is one you can link to from the list over there on the side of the page: John Thorne. Thorne is far more of an outsider than the other two, but once again, I consider him important to the American food story for his doggedness in seeking out historical precedents and attempting to reproduce classic bygone dishes at a time when this was something very few were doing, as well as his non-gor-may attitude, and, most importantly, his ability to render that attitude and the reasoning leading up to it in absolutely crystal-clear prose. Thorne’s never been in much of a position to deal with classic French cuisine, having spent his formative cooking years in rural Maine and, now, in Massachusetts, but his was the absolutely perfect recipe for cornmeal pancakes I cooked this past Sunday morning and when I heard he was investigating Louisiana Cajun and Creole cuisine for his book Serious Pig
, I was happy to pass on to him all the knowledge — and recipes — I had. (He wound up quoting me). I’m happy to have noticed that, after a slight interruption, he seems to be publishing the Simple Cooking newsletter again, and you could do yourself no bigger favor if you like to cook — and, just as importantly, if you want to read some of the best-written, best-thought-out writing on food and foodways — than to send the Thornes money for a year’s subscription.
What all three of these figures have in common is what breakaway cookbook author Eric Gower calls “mindfulness,” a being-there-in-the-moment approach to the not-so-simple acts of cooking and eating. This kind of mindfulness is at the core of the approach Pollan is suggesting in his long essay — and about as far away from the celebrity-driven honky-tonk of the second half of Kamp’s book as you can get. It’s also, I’m utterly convinced, at the heart of healthy, sane living, something I may not always achieve, but not for the lack of these exemplars’ lessons. In short, I’m glad I read Kamp’s book, for the scandal and for his attempt to structure a story which didn’t seem to want to sit still. But I do think it’s necessary to point out that that’s not all there is to the story.
Over the years, it’s become something of a tradition: a visit to Green Week at the mammoth ICC convention center, perfect for combatting those mid-January blues. It’s a huge celebration of food, a Berlin tradition ever since the end of World War II, with countries from around the world and all of the German states showing their wares.
But I think I’m over it.
I hadn’t been in a couple of years, so this time I guarded my cash reserves so I could go there and, I hoped, pick up some cool stuff I couldn’t get anywhere else, which is something that’s always happened before. It was going to take a little more cash than usual; in the past, I’d either had a press pass or had friends in the restaurant business who were overwhelmed by freebie tickets from their suppliers. After all, the real reason for this event is so that German wholesale grocers and restaurant suppliers could make contacts with the agricultural export and processed food export divisions of other countries, although we normal consumers could always get something unusual to eat and sometimes bargains to bring back home.
Olive oil, for one thing. Back when quality olive oil was hard to find in this city, Green Week gave you the opportunity to sample oil from the entire Mediterranean, with Greece, and particularly Crete, selling a wide range of oils. My bet, though, was always the guy from Tunisia who showed up with oil from the same farm on which he grew the grapes for his (not very good) wine. Tunisia is Italy’s dirty little secret: “Italian” olive oil only has to contain a limited percentage of grown-in-Italy oil to be so labelled. The rest is almost always made up of high-quality, low-price Tunisian stuff. Thus, I could buy a half-liter of pure Tunisian oil for five Euros, thereby saving myself about 15 Euros for a fancy label.
Another regular stop was the Irish stand, where I not only knew a couple of the people working there, but I could also pick up some actual Cheddar cheese with flavor. Yeah, it was Kerrygold, from some huge mega-corporation, but after the orange rubber which passes for Cheddar in Berlin, it was pure heaven, and never lasted very long.
Then there’d be serendipity: the year some Mexicans gave me a bunch of jalapeno and serrano chiles because they couldn’t give them away to the Germans and were happy to see someone who knew what they were and appreciated them. The year I suddenly realized, in the middle of the exhibition hall, that I was out of coffee and almost immediately came upon the Cameroonian stand, which sold me some stuff that turned out to be delicious. There was the intensely smoky (and never again seen) sauna ham from Finland, the hair-raising and sweat-inducing Estonian mustard, the year the Portugese were unloading cans of tuna in olive oil for 19 cents. Before the pasta ladies started showing up at the Thursday market at Hackescher Markt (before there was a Thursday market at Hackescher Markt, for that matter), it was a source for high-end Parmesan cheese, and the guy always talked me into buying a salame soaked in Barolo wine, which could turn an ordinary pizza truly extraordinary.
But this year: nothing.
Well, almost nothing. The Tunisians had long ago stopped bringing wine and olive oil, and concentrated on herbs and crappy handcrafts, but this year, that same olive oil (with a much-improved label) was there, and was dutifully scored. As was almost-authentic Cajun sausage (under the name Knoblauch Knacker) from the Wattwurm Wurst guy, who shows up at various markets — although not, alas, in Berlin — around this part of the country. But something basic has changed in the way this thing is presented to the public, and not in a good way at all.
Part of the problem is alcohol. Green Week has always had a large contingent of vendors of beer and wine — indeed, it’s impossible to imagine a German food show without big displays of German beer and wine, with the former, at least, being done around bars dispensing the sponsor’s product. And, of course, people drink it and become what the American alcohol industry calls “overserved.” National stands always offer some sort of local schnapps, too, and people drink those on top of the beer. Late in the day at Green Week can be pretty nasty, especially in the men’s bathrooms. But if you wanted something else, there was a wide range of stuff to eat. There was far less of that this time, and people were far more drunk at 3 in the afternoon than I’d ever seen them. And on a Tuesday, at that. (Always avoid Green Weekends). No doubt, behind the Albanian vodka, there were Albanian export guys selling Albanian lamb to German restaurant suppliers. But boy, was there a lot of alcohol.
Another part of the problem, sad to say, is Germany. The Republic of Malaysia, which is spending millions this year promoting its cuisine, a promotion I’d love to get in on, was absent. Fortunately, I had a real live Malaysian to consult on this, and he told me that the government gave up. “The Germans hated the food.” Well, I can understand that: it wasn’t Chinapfanne, that gooey, malodorous concoction so many Germans think is what people eat in that (broadly defined) area of the world. The Malaysians made the mistake of offering actual Malaysian food instead of Malaysiapfanne, and got rejected. Meanwhile, I stood by the Vietnamese stalls, which were cooking up Chinapfanne of some sort while waiting to hook up with a friend who was at the show and was going to meet me there, and I finally recognized the component of the dish that makes it smell so bad: overcooked cabbage. Germans, of course, have no problem with overcooked cabbage.
But it goes beyond the Malaysians and their hurt feelings. Other nations were missing as well. Israel, purveyor of loads of the vegetables and fruits in our markets during the winter, was absent, as, thank heavens, were their stinky Pfanne. Ireland, where I’d usually beg off a steak sandwich one of my pals was ready to cook up for me, and where I’d really hoped to stock up on some white sharp cheddar: missing, although Guinness was represented by two bars. France, which is usually promoting beef (which Germans barely eat), cheese (but not the higher-end stuff, just the heavily-processed fake Brie and so on you find in our supermarkets), oysters (which R in season!), and downmarket wines (wine “tastings” with an eye towards getting you to subscribe to regular deliveries are a big scam at Green Week): pas la. The United States of America, for heaven’s sakes, which was usually willing to embarrass itself by a hotdog-and-doughnut stand, another place selling Samuel Adams beer, a wine-subscription guy selling Californa wine, and, uh, some company in Wisconsin that made pots and pans: outta here.
My take on this is that the world’s exporters have more or less given up on Germany as a market for quality stuff. Of course, I didn’t need to go half-way across town and spend 12 Euros to get into the ICC to postulate this: all I’d need to do would be to visit the “upmarket” food floor at Kaufhof in Alexanderplatz, but spending three hours on the floor of Green Week brought it home. The people who buy for the German mass market haven’t yet discovered what I know to be a sizeable contingent of younger (ie, 30-40-year-old) consumers with more refined (or, let us at least say, less crass) tastes which are making inroads even here in impoverished Berlin. So they buy what they’ve always bought, and feed the masses with booze and Pfanne and stuff that looks just like traditional German food but which is jacked up with MSG (that’s E 621 for you label readers, or Natriumglutamat). Meanwhile, the jungle telegraph among my friends passes along news of a new store where you can get some good things that were hitherto unavailable, a new restaurant that is good enough that it probably won’t make it, a mail-order house which ships to Germany. In fact, I’ll be posting some of this stuff as soon as the info reaches critical mass.
Tamales in Berlin? Impossible. Well, not entirely. There was a Mexican woman who showed up at the first Karneval der Kulturen and handed out tamales to promote her new tamale-making business, and dissolved in tears after the Germans first accepted them, then threw them in the street because they couldn’t bite through the corn-husks. Never occurred to them to unwrap them, I guess. But — wise woman that she was — she soon gave up the business.
Late last summer, though, a friend from Texas announced he was coming over, and I asked him if he could bring some stuff over for me, including some cornmeal. Instead of cornmeal, I got a four-pound sack of masa harina, the treated cornmeal you make tortillas from. Oops! But when I mentioned this to RFM, he mentioned he was going to California and could pick up some corn husks and any other stuff I might need to make tamales with. Just the ticket! He dutifully bought a few thousand of them, and I researched a recipe, coming upon this one, which, with some tweaking, looked like it would do the trick.
Finding a time and a place that was convenient to all took a bit of doing, but on Sunday, he, his friend Kristen, and I showed up at the dancer’s place (she’s got the only kitchen big enough to do this) and got down to some serious tamale making. Actually, I showed up first to get five pounds of pork roast and two chickens boiling and returned some hours later to find them boiled and cooled off. I proceeded to shred nearly the whole meat-mountain by hand, which was essential; as we discovered, the strings of meat are like shreds of tobacco to be rolled into a tamale/cigarette.
Next, I heated the meat-seasoning paste on the stove and cooled it some. By this time Mike and Kristen had showed up, and it was time to get to work. First, Mike kneaded the spice-paste into the meat:
Next, I stirred more spices into the dry masa, added some oil, and then we whisked in the broth with an electric mixer. All this while, the corn husks had been soaking in the sink, so we were ready to go. Here’s the wet fixins:
Learning not to overfill them, learning to roll them correctly, and learning to fold them carefully wasn’t easy, as you can see from the wide variety of shapes they wound up in:
As it turned out, Kristen was extremely proficient at making perfect tamales:
Her secret was to really roll them back and forth in the husk, just as you shape a cigarette in a cigarette paper. She can probably roll something that looks like a Camel with one hand. Anyway, we took the first batch and steamed them while we were rolling the next batch: we had two pots and two steaming baskets we could use, which was fortunate because it sped things up well. The recipe said to steam them for two hours, which seemed excessive and — fortunately, because we were starving by now — was. About 30 minutes proved to be enough to firm up the gloppy masa and heat the meat all the way through, and before long we were attacking them like the ravenous beasts we were: the smell had long since permeated the kitchen.
They don’t look so good, but if you could smell this photograph, you’d know that looks aren’t everything:
After dinner, we realized there was a lot of meat left over, so we whipped up another bowl of masa and continued rolling. This last batch we didn’t bother to steam, and I produced a box of Zip-Loc bags and proceded to pack tamales, six to a bag, ready to freeze. We each wound up with three bags apiece, each as heavy as a brick. Kristen shows off part of her take:
Quite a project, and physically exhausting, but I’d happily do it again. Once, that is, I’m through eating the ones I have.
