Take my breath away…

…well, what else would I title a post about BERLIN? And it is a city that takes my breath away, every damn time. It knocks my socks off; it’s my Madonna’s New York (other cities make me feel like a dork). I had a rock-solid wunderbar four days in my family’s home city last weekend. We stayed in the east, in the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, in an apartment with a terrace and resident wasp, wish I had a picture of the staircase, it was beauts.

FOOD
Our neighbourhood was the BEST for food. We were near an organic supermarket crammed full of deliciousness (and also with a giant cow outside), and every cafe, bar, burger joint and restaurant we passed looked like a winner. We had breakfast twice at Anna Blume.

No photos of our first brekkie, a three-layer cakestand filled with cured meats, cheese, smoked salmon, mozzarella balls with pesto, salads, roasted vegetables, houmous, tzatziki, scrambled eggs and fresh fruit, served with a basket of fucking amazing bread. €17 for two, ridiculous, it could’ve fed us for a week and we’d have paid double.  But check out the €5 birchermuesli, what even is this amazingness:

On Saturday night we got burgers at the highly recommended The Bird, run by New Yorkers who know their burgers. It is a loud, rock’n'roll, brick-walled meat fest, with excellent beer, ridiculously hot waitresses with cool buzzcut hair, and an array of hot sauces that will END you. No burger pic cos when someone puts a burger that good in front of you, it is a fucking crime to take a photo instead of putting your face right into it and performing burgerlingus. I had the Ghetto Deluxe, €10.50.

Our last night we were in an Italian mood and had a kickass pasta dinner with giant salads and more ridiculously awesome bread and red wine for some ridiculous sum, like €15. It’s on the same road as Anna Blume but like on a corner opposite a shop that sold jewellery made from small plastic animals. It’s this level of reporting accuracy that makes me the mega-successful journalist I am.

Another great place to eat is the biergarten in the Tiergarten, the one to the southwest right by the zoo, aka Cafe Am Neuen See. Its canteen does boss pretzels to dip in mustard (omigod the memories), €2.20, and its pizzas, €8.50, are excellent. Get a weissbier, sit by the lake and watch idiots trying and failing to row. I also made eyes at a pretty hot single dad who looked like The Dude. Wish I was here:

FOREST
On the Monday we headed out on the train from Alexanderplatz to Lübbenau and the Spreewald, which is a forest in an especially efficient German sense, it’s ridiculously unwildernessy – but beautiful – with lots of very neat little islands and formal gardens and teeny-tiny bridges. The only super-naturey thing about it is the pterodactyl-sized mosquitoes which ravaged my virgin flesh and left me distinctly bubonic plaguey. Also, it’s the place to go if you want to see a dog on a boat, and let’s face it, who doesn’t?

Lübbenau is “the city of pickles” and it delivered in style, we bought a BUCKET (with a lid and a handle and everything) of pickles from a roadside stall for €2.5, and also had some amazing pickles served with our currywurst and chips dinner (I am all class). My German is mega-rusty and I managed to order us green beer with my language skillz:

FASHION
Berlin has the best flea markets and vintage shops ever, right? Right. We actually only hit one vintage shop – four days is just not long enough to fit in all the beer-drinking, walking, eating, eating, and eating, as well as shopping – Alex on Rosa-Luxembourg Strasse, very near Alexanderplatz. I scored:

A clearly handmade (no label; you can see the thread knots inside) mustard yellow jumper that’s fluffy inside AND out (as you can see from the turned-up sleeve close-up) that is so blatantly some kid’s homemade bear costume, I can’t even. I shall spend the winter dressed like a bear! And all for €25, immense.

A DRAMATIC satin and taffeta ballgown skirt, €35, with multiple layers that SWISHES and has a bustle effect, it’s like if McQueen were doing the costumes for a Gone With the Wind remake where Scarlett O’Hara was actually a witch. It’s so ridiculous, but also deeply practical for covering up my mosquito-destroyed legs, I wore it with my Charlotte Free T-shirt yesterday and looked like a punka.

Finally for €10 in the “bargain basket” I got a pair of high-waisted flannel hot pants/knickers with a tiny sailboat on, I think Posy Fossil would wear these to her classes or just for general romping.

I picked up these badass sunglasses at a street market on Strasse des 17 Juni right by Ernst-Reuter-Haus, musta been serendipity. (More on the Reuter thang later.) I thought they were €4, bargain, after much lost-in-translation they turned out to be €40, ouch, but I bargained her* down to €20, boom. They are made in West Germany AND they have holes in the arms to pop them on a chain. I feel like Carole King when I wear them:

*She totally saw me coming.

(Apols for the crappy, unedited, uncropped pictures. My laptop is being a bastard – don’t buy Dell, kidlets – and Photoshopping at this point is making me cry hot angry tears of Judy Blume character meltdown frustration. I had plans to make this shit look pretty and do collages and stuff. At this point I’ll be happy just to hit publish. Sigh. The crappiness of my computer does at least reassure me that the robot takeover is really, REALLY far off.)

FLEA MARKETS
Although we were staying right by one flea, we decided to take the tram to Friedrichshain instead and hit its less full-o’-people flea, also getting trams is super-fun and makes me feel 19th-century. Totally worth the trip, guys! Lookit what I got:

FOXES. €1 each and worth every cent, I reckon you’ll agree.

Plastic horses with moveable heads, €1 each. (I turn 31 next week, why am I buying toys?)

Deer! Also €1 each, I am the queen of finding €1 tat.

FAMILY
You should all totally take my recommendations on where to eat and shop as I am the bestest, but I cannot in good faith send you out west nearly to the end of the U2 line to Ernst-Reuter-Platz station and, well, platz, as it is entirely irrelevant to your interests unless you are me or a fellow Ernst relative (hi, cousin Natalie, if you’re reading!).

It’s just a big ol’ roundabout, BUT it’s a big ol’ roundabout named after my great grandfather Ernst Reuter, mayor of post-war West Berlin and all-round badass. Check out his steeze:

What a cool cat. There’s also a weirdo sculpture there, naturally I posed in front of it giving it my best smize. It is beyond-nice to hang out in a country where people can pronounce and spell my surname (in England I get a lot of “Renter? Rooter?” because people be idiots), and at Ernst-Reuter-Platz I basically see the REUTER name up in lights! (Well, not lights. You know.) Here I am being a dork in the U-Bahn station:

Anyway. Berlin: I LOVE YOU. For real and true, for life.

Red beans and rice didn’t miss her

I don’t often venture to West London, because, well, WEST LONDON. (The mapin my head of London goes: Brixton, work, Soho, river; everywhere else, HERE BE DRAGONS.)

But I was tempted to go to the left, to the left by an invitation to Outsider Tart‘s chili night. Outsider Tart is a bakery near Turnham Green run by the delightful two Davids, who shipped over here from NYC: think brownies the size of Manhattan and a Little House on the Prairie-style dry-goods store where you can pick up everything from maple syrup to dirty-rice mix and approx. 800 varieties of hot sauce.

Every Thursday, thanks to popular demand (as da kids say), they stay open late, cook up a big ol’ pot of chili (it’s different every time, call ahead if you’re vegetarian/vegan and they’ll fix you something) and serve it up for £6 a pop with cornbread, laid-back family style. BYOB, chat to people, eat chili, possibly buy several dozen brownies to take home…

Last night DavidSquared2 hosted a bunch of foodies, including lucky me and my BFF, and cooked us traditional beef chili, a more mellow pork variety, and vegetarian jambalaya, served with two varieties of cornbread, cheese’n'sour cream, and some decent American beers.

I had thought US booze was all of the insipid Coors/Rolling Rock/Miller/Please kill me now so I don’t have to drink this pisswater type, but I was proved wrong with various pale ales and porters, including one with a heady 9.6% alcohol content. HELLO, LOVER.

We sat a-chatting on a steamy summer evening, downing bowl after bowl of chili, only pausing to consider our fullness and distended bellies when David 1 wheeled out a RED VELVET CHEESECAKE the size of a bicycle wheel… Seriously, check out that bad boy up top. I SAW GOD, Y’ALL. I somehow found room (pudding stomach, right?) to manage half a slice.

The Davids run a hilarious blog at OutsiderTart.com and this autumn will be opening BLUE PLATE, a soul food restaurant right next door to the original bakery. Get to west London and in line now.

We’ll drink till we start to see lovely pink elephants

There are few things in this dark dark world that I love more than gin. My top ten life loves:

1. Playing the “between levels” Super Mario Brothers games on Nintendo Original Flava to earn extra gold coin and for LOLs.
2. Abbreves and acronyms, unironic use thereof. It’s just LOLz!
3. Just Seventeen magazine, always and forever
4. Pacey Witter
5. Gin
6. Velociraptors, particularly my brother’s impression of one
7. William Goldman, always and forever
8. New York. Other cities make me feel like a dork
9. Tindersticks. World’s greatest band. No arguments
10. The unparalleled oeuvre of Joss Whedon

My freezer is, more often than not, stocked with at least two bottles of gin. Favourites include Beefeater London Dry, Tanqueray No 10 and Hendrick’s (I was given a bottle for my 30th birthday. It’s gone now, but we had some good times together). Mama Dukes makes a particularly good damson or sloe gin every Christmas, to be sipped neat, old-broad style.

It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished ‘em well

My dear university friend Sarah is a volcanologist studying Vulcans in Alaska with her paramour Silvio, a fellow volcanologist from Rome. This pair of Vesuvius-loving geekazoids got hitched on Saturday in London and held the reception at a Moroccan-themed restaurant.

Between Alaska, Rome, Morocco, visitors flying in from Italy, Australia, Switzerland and America, it was a somewhat multicultural event, so naturally for their wedding cake they requested…an olde English country cottage wedding style sponge cake.

And I was tasked with baking it!

Hey, mambo! Mambo Italiano!

I don’t think I stayed in a hotel until I was 22. B&Bs or pensiones on road trips through France in the 1980s with my parents, yes – the sorts of places where you hand your key back in at reception each time you go out – but hotels? Nope.

In consequence I have that cringing, servile, BRITISH attitude in hotels. A bellhop take my bags? Aaaargh. Tipping? HELP. ME. That and I’m constantly broke, so live in fear that I’ll accidentally sleep-eat the minibar or call the speaking clock on the moon or something and have an almighty checkout bill.

So the prospect of a fancy hotel trip to Rome, while obviously mega-excite, filled me with just a wee bit of dread at the social awkwardness that I can bring to a high-falutin’ living situation.

I needn’t have feared. Don’t think I’ve ever felt so comfortable in a hotel as I did at the Rome Cavalieri: so much so that I took FULL advantage of the approx. 80 bajillion pillows provided to make……….a pillow fort!

Picture me nesting inside this bad boy!

(Some people stay at fancy hotels for the sophistication. I…make pillow forts.)

Ra ra Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine

Well, what else was I going to title a review of a Russian restaurant? Last night I had dinner at Mari Vanna, during its soft opening period. There are already three other outposts of this kitschy resto worldwide, in St Petersburg, Moscow and New York (where appaz Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger are fans).

The concept is basically “eating comfort food and getting spannered on vodka shots in your crazy Russian grandma’s parlour”. I’m picturing said babushka as a cross between Barbara Cartland and one of the Romanovs, bee tee dubs. Now, I live in a house CRAMMED full of junk shop shit and tiny oddbods picked up from chazzas and car boots, but Mari Vanna makes my joint look minimalist:

Photograph by Lisa Linder

Seriously, isn’t that the most delightful LSD-trip-through-granny’s-front-room thing you ever did see? EVERYWHERE I looked there was something I wanted to half-inch (obviously I didn’t), from the mismatched floral china to kilner jars of pickles on the hand-painted shelving units.

The last time I ate Russian/Ukranian food was at a house party thrown by my baby brother and cousin in Sheffield, which kicked off with borscht for the early-comers, some Ukranian salads brought by my cousin’s friend and then…nothing. The boys provided jars of gherkins and a PLATE OF CUBED SMOKED PIG FAT and all the vodka in the world, served from samovars, and no other food.

I don’t remember much of that party, except my bro did Cossack dancing in the basement, which they’d whitewashed and painted Russian slogans on in red paint to terrifying effect (mostly they translated to things like “Will and Sam are brilliant”).

On the menu at Mari Vanna it’s ultra-tradish: Russian salad, herring salad, beetroot salad…basically the salad section is heavy on the potatoes and mayo.

Things kick off with The Most Amazing Rye Bread in the World, served with A Herb Butter That Is Basically Like Crack in Dairy Form. Frankly, I wanted to hump it. (Can you believe I don’t have a professional newspaper restaurant review column?)

I ate a starter of blinis with sour cream, egg, red onion, herbs and lightly salted salmon, £17, or to translate: pancakes and smoked salmon with little bowls of deliciousness to sprinkle over and make messes with. Mah dining companion (I want to give her a nickname like the pros do, let’s call her Johnny Castle for the LOL) started with zucchini fritters with salmon, £12, which frankly was the better choice.

It’s not…diet food? Or hot weather food for that matter. You wouldn’t want to sit in a chintzy overstuffed parlour noshing on meat-and-potatoes dishes on a rare British summer day, but on a cold and rainy April evening, my chicken fritters with mashed potato and gherkins, £16, and Johnny Castle’s beef stroganoff, £22, which comes with buckwheat, and a shared dish of steamed vegetables, £7, was perfect.

The unfortunate side effect of such filling food is that a bottle of red wine and a vodka shot each left us not even a little bit drunk. (Maybe a bit, I did start contemplating why Germany didn’t invade Russia in the summer and said out loud, “Oh, Adolf, it could have all been so different”.) The vodka is deeeeeee-licious though.

Also, we could barely finish pudding, aka The Best Bit of Any Tea. Johnny Castle opted for a Napoleon, £11, basically a Russian take on a millefeuille and the greatest thing your tongue will ever taste; and I had the Bird’s Milk, £6, which is hard to describe – like a cakey moussey funny-textured thing? My table manners are terrible and when Johnny Castle asked what it was like I said “prod it, it’s weird” and she basically prodded my pudding with her finger NOT A EUPHEMISM.

I then described the Bird’s Milk as “like giving a blow job to Dr Zhivago” and that’s basically why I have this blog as an outlet for idiocy like that so I don’t have to put it in my work copy and get in trouble.

Mari Vanna is somewhat spendy, but then, it’s Knightsbridge innit. The food isn’t blow-your-mind worth the cash, but it’s as good as Boney M’s “Rasputin” ie really fucking good. And the vodka list is INSANE. Also, it’s worth a visit for the barmy, floral, padded walls toilets alone, really. Blah blah, insert your own standard “from Russia with love” punny conclusion here.

Harriet was a guest of Mari Vanna.

Mari Vanna, 116 Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7PJ (020 7225 3122) marivanna.co.uk