Category: Food and Drink
How to eat well in Berlin
Paris has dozens of restaurants which are better than any in Berlin, and then hundreds more better than the rest. Yet it may be the case that you have, overall, a better food life in Berlin than in Paris.
Berlin has a weak reputation among foodies, but culinary life in the city is much improved. Here are my tips for a good eating life in Berlin:
1. Find a steady source of innovative rolls, buns, and dark breads. These are the glories of Berlin and in many parts of town there will be at least one such source per residential block. The more irregular the colors, seeds, and topologies of the breads, the more enthusiastically you should buy them. Do not treat this as the French bread buying experience.
2. Find a source for good spreads, such as cherry, raspberry, etc. and stock up. Repeatedly apply the spreads to the breads, until death of the researcher intervenes. This procedure is the basis for everything else you will do. It ensures that all of your food days will be good ones.
3. Seek out mid-level German restaurants, of the kind promoted in the Time Out Guide; Renger-Patzsch is a good example. The vegetables in such places will be consistently excellent.
4. The speed and service quality of most meals will be much better if you arrive before 7 p.m.
5. Don't obsess over German food. It's underrated, but still a lot of it isn't that good. In Berlin, and many other parts of Germany, you have first-class delicatessens or stores with foodstuffs from France, Italy, and many other parts of the world. Use them. Berlin offers one of the best overall selections in this regard, better than New York City or Paris, for instance, in terms of real access. You can eat first-rate French cheese every day.
6. When it comes to Berlin German food, don't eat anything in a sauce. It will be either boring or disgusting. Sorry.
7. The sausage spread at the KaDeWe (make sure you live near that place) is probably the best in the entire world. Go there regularly. They also have first-rate sausages from France, Spain, and other countries, as well as an unparalleled selection of sausages from the different regions of Germany, organized one region per case. This food source, like #1, insures that each of your food days will be a splendid one.
8. Go to Berlin's numerous and varied ethnic restaurants, especially in the slightly lower rent districts. If the food is supposed to be spicy, you must repeat the following incantation several times: "Ich will es essen, genau wie Sie es zu Hause essen. Ich bin kein deutscher." [I want to eat it exactly as you eat it at home. I am not a German."] Repeat especially that last part: "Ich bin kein deutscher." Repeat it even if you are a German. This will usually work and typically your Chinese or Thai or Indian server will smile and laugh in response. If they view you as a German, you are screwed no matter what. Simply asking for the food to be "spicy" or even "very spicy" is laughable. It is showing yourself to be a fool and a sucker.
9. Food here is much cheaper than in Paris, and it is much easier to get into virtually any restaurant. Take advantage of both features.
10. Italian food here is almost always reasonably good, and reasonably cheap, but it is rarely great. Lots of cream sauces. It's a good enough fall back and you find it virtually everywhere. A quite good pasta for $6 or even less is a common experience. Sometimes it's actually German food in disguise, or not in disguise, such as when you get Carpaccio with Pfifferlinge.
11. For ethnic food, I recommend the following: Tian Fu in Wilmersdorf (very good Sichuan), Suriya-Kanthi (Sri Lankan in Prenzlauer Berg), Genazvale (Georgian food in Charlottenburg), Degirman is one good Turkish place of many, a slew of authentic Mexican restaurants (more than in Virginia), DAO restaurant in Charlottenburg (Thai food, best papaya salad I've had, all-around excellent), and Schneeweiss has first-rate Wiener Schnitzel.
Overall Sri Lankan and Nepalese and East bloc cuisines are better here, or more available, than in the USA.
If you visit for one day, you won't be so impressed with culinary life in Berlin. If you stay for a month, you won't want to go back to what you had before.
Interview with Tyler Cowen, pay-as-you-wish restaurants
To find out if the pay-what-you-can model could work for a restaurant, Salon spoke with Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University (and food writer), from Berlin, Germany.
Do you think this pay-what-you-can model could actually work for restaurants?
You can have a small number of restaurants that use it, but if every restaurant were like that, it would never work. It gets people talking. It's like Radiohead — for the first group that does it, it's a good idea, but is it a good model for the industry? Not really. Imagine McDonald's at Times Square working on this principle. If you kept on going or eating they would discourage you from coming.
Do you think it could work on a small scale — two or three restaurants in a city?
I'm not even sure it can in the long run. I'm not sure if these places will still be going in three years' time. Part of the problem is if you're a customer and what you pay is voluntary, you're under pressure to pay a lot of money. You do it once to prove to yourself and others how charitable you are, but how many people go back 17 times? I would find it a burden — my reputation is on the line. What if I only pay $ 27 instead of $ 34? What does my date think? What does my wife think? You end up wanting to feel liberated and just paying a listed cash price. I think there's no way to solve that problem.
But Radiohead's experiment was fairly succesful. What's the difference between it and a restaurant?
With Radiohead, there's a focal price of about $10, which is pretty cheap. If you download an album and send in $10, you feel you've done your bit, and it's not a question of repeat business. You download the album once. Radiohead makes most of its income by touring, so even if they lose money on the album, but get more popular, they can just go on tour. A restaurant has no other way to get that money back. They count on the people to pay for their food.
Is there anything that these restaurants can do to encourage people to pay more?
You have to feel like you're being watched. You have to feel that other people are paying. You have to feel like you're part of a cool experiment. Even with Radiohead. it's wrong to call them neighborly, but their fans pretend they're a tight-knit pool of cool people. That's an illusion, but you're still relying on a peer effect. It's a way to feel you're better — that you're so committed to the band you paid for something out of your own pocket.
Are some sectors of the economy better suited to this kind of pay-what-you-can model?
It depends on what you mean by giving things away for free. There's plenty of stuff that gets given away for free, like NPR. But once NPR's content is produced, it doesn't cost them extra to have additional listeners. With restaurants, if somebody eats another plate of veal, it costs them money. It'll keep this strategy limited. There may be some niche on a small level for these kinds of restaurants, but it's hard to imagine people saying that they've been to six of these restaurant and they're about to go to their seventh.
Why are these restaurants popping up now?
I'm actually not surprised you see them in down economic times. You let some people pay less that can't pay more — it's part of the charm. But these days there's a restaurant for every possible cuisine, and so many marketing tricks. Restaurateurs are exploring every last possible idea. If you were opening a restaurant in 1957, you could do almost anything beyond steak and potatoes and be considered new, but if it's 2010 and you're across the street from the Malaysian place with roller skates, it makes some sense.
Markets in everything
This one is from Australia:
Chef Yukako Ichikawa has introduced a 30 percent discount for diners who eat all the food they have ordered at Wafu, her 30-seat restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, that describes itself as "guilty free Japanese cuisine."
"To contribute toward creating a sustainable future we request a little more of our guests than most other restaurants," she says in a list of her restaurant's policies that is pinned on the door to the eatery.
This list includes finishing all dishes ordered which are organic and free of gluten, dairy, sugar and eggs and the chef and her staff tell people who don't clear their plates to choose another restaurant next time.
"Finishing your meal requires that everything is eaten except lemon slices, gari (sushi ginger) and wasabi," says the menu.
"Please also note that vegetables and salad on the side are NOT decorations; they are part of the meal too."
The link is here and I thank Mein Lindenbaum for the pointer.
Of course one economic effect is to discourage diners from ordering more food. That means, ceteris paribus, higher prices. If you wish to cast a non-crazy gloss on this, think of it as one way to signal and precommit to higher quality! Have any of you eaten there?
Purchasing power parity?
…due to the strength of the euro against the pound, hundreds of Britons living in France are now using the internet to order their food, including many French specialities, from British supermarkets.
Simon Goodenough, the director of Sterling Shopping, a delivery firm based in Brackley, Northamptonshire, says his company has 2,500 British customers in France and is running five delivery vans full of food to France each week.
…we have delivered bottles of Bergerac wine bought from Sainsbury's to a customer in Bergerac. We even have a few French customers who have now heard about what we do. They love things like curries and tacos, which they just can't get in France."
This seems to be an arbitrage opportunity:
"The savings for buying food, in particular, are amazing due to the strength of the euro. Customers tell us that for every £100 they would spend in France buying food, they save £30 buying through us, even with our 15% commission. A lot of people are using us to get things they really miss, such as bacon and sausages."
The full story is here.
Salt
Chicken noodle soup has been especially vexing, he said. With only 150 calories, a single can of the condensed soup has more than a whole day’s recommended sodium for most Americans.
Here is much more, interesting throughout. Here is one response:
Joanne L. Slavin, a committee member and nutrition professor at the University of Minnesota, told her colleagues that reducing salt in bread was difficult and warned of unintended consequences. It is an argument also made by food companies.
“Typically, sodium, sugar bounces around,” she said. “So you take sodium down in a product and then sugar a lot of times has to go up just for taste.”
Against Dust
In the past few months I have noticed a terrible trend in fancy restaurants, dust. Dust, not on the floor mind you, but on the food especially the desserts. The trend, for example, is to nestle ice cream in a bed of chocolate dust. Not chocolate chunks or even bits but a chocolate grit that ruins the elegant smoothness of the ice cream–like eating ice cream that has been dropped in the sand. Apologies in advance for the name dropping but the guilty include Marcus Samuellson at Aquavit, Wylie Dufresne at WD-50, Martin Rios at Restaurant Martin and Passion Fish in Virginia.
Dust is evil.
End rant.
Food in Istanbul
My favorite sight has been the mother-daughter pair I saw on the Bosporous ferry. They were hugging each other on the bench and had virtually the same profile features, yet the mother carried full traditional dress and the daughter wore a mini-skirt and was otherwise dressed comparably. They loved each other dearly.
How you interpret these women is central to how you view Istanbul. One intuition is that they are quite alike, another is that they are quite different.
And the food? You can eat the traditional dishes, in simpler settings, or you can pay extra to eat them — slightly modified — in more gussied up surroundings. The key to eating well here is to go simple and to look for the best and purest versions of straightforward dishes. World class raw ingredients are at your disposal, if only you don't let anyone ruin them.
It's not hard to find the good stuff. Thousands of street restaurants offer seafood (the fried small smelts are my favorite, then the sea bream or "levrek"), eggplants, fava beans, doner kebab, fried mussels, salads with cheese and tomatoes, lamb brains, fried and baked potatoes, Turkish ravioli (harder to find), spicy kabob with sumac, and other delicacies. It is common for the small restaurants to specialize, an indication of quality. A meal in these places, with one small portion, will cost six to ten dollars but you can (and should) order more. Turkish sweets are the dessert and I prefer something with pistachio.
The rest is a sideshow. Avoid all restaurants near the main sights or near clusters of tourist hotels. Avoid most of the places — even Turkish ones — on the main thoroughfares. Look for the neighborhood side streets with clusters of these small restaurants, just off the larger roads. If you order small dishes, you can visit two or three restaurants in one meal, no problem.
My favorite small Istanbul restaurants have been the soup houses, especially the tripe soup (NB: you don't have to like most tripe dishes to enjoy these creations). You ladle in some liquid garlic sauce, paprika, a bit of chili pepper, and a green herb of some kind. Some of these places are open for breakfast.
Unless you've bled this city dry and sampled all the major dishes (which would take a long time), the return to going upscale, or seeking innovation, is not overwhelming. What happens is that you're either paying higher prices to be in the company of attractive Turkish women or to impress attractive Turkish women who are already in your company. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the basic market model here is segregation of restaurant type. If it's food you're after, don't pay more for the culinary twists. The food will remain recognizably Mediterranean but it won't be the classic treatment you are looking for and which to you is still original on the fifth day of your trip.
If your restaurant has a good number of attractive Turkish women in it, perhaps you made a food mistake. Or should I say a money mistake? Or what kind of mistake? The cuisine still will be good.
The good here is very good and the best isn't that much better.
Bond markets in everything
British high-end chocolate maker and retailer Hotel Chocolat, which currently operates over 40 stores in the UK, the Middle East and the US, wants to expand even further. But rather than turning to banks or big investors for money, they're inviting customer to buy bonds. Bonds that will pay chocolate returns.
Two values of Chocolate Bond will be issued: both with the return paid in monthly Tasting Boxes. Holders of a GBP 2,000 Chocolate Bond will receive six free tasting boxes a year worth GBP 107.70 per year, and those holding a GBP 4,000 bond will receive thirteen boxes, worth GBP 233.35 per year. Which comes down to a 5.38% return. After an initial term of three years, and on every anniversary thereafter, bond holders can redeem their bond for a full return of their investment. If they decide to continue to hold the bond, the monthly boxes will keep on coming.
The link is here and hat tip goes to Eric John Barker.
Sixteen products they sell only at the Chinese Walmarts
1. Crocodiles
2. Bulk rice (TC is this true?)
3. Mixed meat (check out the photo below)
4. Orange juice and cooking oil, wrapped and bundled together
5. Turtles
6. ???? (check out the photo)
7. Walmart brand spirits
8. Rib cages (have I seen those in Mexico Walmart?)
9. Assorted dried reptiles
10. "Beautiful boxes of liquor"
11. Frogs
12. "A Large selection of chopsticks"
13. Ducks (TC: dubious)
14. Great Value Brand Hot and Spicy Beef Granules
15. Pig faces
16. Antibacterial bikini underwear for men (awesome photo)
The link, with photos is here, and I thank Leon Bergen for the pointer.
The Executive dining room at the World Bank
The room mixes many different cuisines in the form of a buffet, so you can test directly a theory of buffets, while holding quality of the kitchen constant. The cold part of the buffet is excellent, especially the smoked salmon and the prosciutto with melon, both well above typical U.S. standards. Lamb tends to hold up relatively well in the buffet format. Avoid anything cooked rapidly at high heat, with sealed-in juices. Never take most forms of Chinese food from a buffet. The chicken vindaloo was soggy, though Indian generally does well in the buffet format. I looked for fermented Korean snacks but in vain. The shrimp with cilantro was better than expected, vaguely Peruvian. At no point were they trying to trick me with "filler." Overall you could do worse than to eat here, which implies donor opinion is a constraint on raising WB salaries explicitly.
What are the other principles for eating properly at buffets?
*Liberated Cooking*
I've been browsing this 1987 book, edited by Marty Zupan and Lou Villadsen, of recipes from libertarians and classical liberals. Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan offers up his take on Middle Tennessee Fried Corn, claiming "Properly done, this is the best dish in the world!"
Select several ears of fresh field corn (not sweet corn), preferably Hickory King white corn. Husk ears, then cut tips of kernels into bowl. Then scrape remaining milk of kernels into bowl.
Add water and salt to mixture. Add 2 tbsp. lard (or other fat) to mixture.
Put in skillet and cook over moderate heat (simmer) for one hour. Add water as needed. Stir to prevent sticking.
You'll also find recipes from Robert Heinlein, Murray Rothbard (he claims his favorite dessert of Cherry Clafouti violates the otherwise praxeological law of diminishing marginal utility), two from David Friedman (medieval and Icelandic), Buchanan's pizza recipe, Ron Paul, David Henderson, Henry Hazlitt, and last but not least Milton Friedman's account of the stuffed cabbage which Rose cooked for him, inspired by her mother Sarah Director. Buchanan's is the only one which sounded tasty to me, possibly the Friedman recipe also.
The popcorn puzzle, an empirical investigation
I've lately found a new empirical paper on why popcorn is so expensive in the movie theater. The authors are Ricard Gil and Wesley Hartmann. Here is the abstract:
Prices for goods such as blades for razors, ink for printers and concessions at movies are often set well above cost. Theory has shown that this could yield a profitable price discrimination strategy often termed “metering.” The idea is that a customer’s intensity of demand for aftermarket goods (e.g. the concessions) provides a meter of how much the customer is willing to pay for the primary good (e.g. admission). If this correlation in tastes for the two goods is positive, a high price on the aftermarket good allows firms to extract a greater total price (admissions plus concessions) from higher type customers. This paper develops a simple aggregate model of discrete-continuous demand to motivate how this correlation can be tested using simple regression techniques and readily available firm data. Model simulations illustrate that the regressions can be used to predict whether aftermarket prices should be above, below or equal to their marginal cost. We then apply the approach to box-office and concession data from a chain of Spanish theaters and find that high priced concessions do extract more surplus from customers with a greater willingness to pay for the admission ticket.
In other words, price discrimination is one (not the only) plausible rationale for why popcorn is so expensive at the movie theater, relative to marginal cost. For other MR posts, on this problem, type "popcorn" into the MR search box on the left hand side of the page.
Cinnamon vs. Cassia
Taste:
Real or True Cinnamon is sweet and delicate where as Cinnamon Cassia is strong to peppery Color: Real Cinnamon is a tan color, whereas Cinnamon Cassia is a reddish brown to dark brown. Look: Cinnamon Cassia bark is thicker because its outer layer isn’t stripped off. For that reason, Cassia sticks curl inward from both sides toward the center as they dry. Real Cinnamon sticks curl from one side only and roll up like a newspaper as shown above. Feel: The surface of Cinnamon Cassia is rough and uneven, whereas Real Ceylon Cinnamon bark is smooth. Usage:
Real Ceylon Cinnamon is perfect in sweet and subtle dishes that require a delicate flavor.
It is important to own some of both. What they call cinnamon I call Mexican cinnamon (though it is imported from Sri Lanka) and what they call cassia is usually called cinnamon or Asian cinnamon. Sichuan recipes often call for cassia, but then "ordinary cinnamon" will do, you don't want Mexican (Sri Lankan) cinnamon.
I found this statement useful:
First picture [at the above link] shows the soft Real Ceylon Cinnamon sticks. These sticks are very soft and one can see the bristles. Second picture shows the hard Cassia sticks that are reddish brown in color and have single CURL that closes inward. One can easily grind the Ceylon Cinnamon in an electric grinder. You may burn the grinder if tried on Cassia !.
Bram Cohen on restaurant reservations
An anonymous reader posted this link in the comments, from Bram Cohen's blog:
Restaurants which generally sell out have an interesting dilemma. In principle they could make more money with higher prices, but then they'd risk not selling out, and empty seats would quickly wipe out any revenue gains from raised prices, not to mention harming that elusive 'buzz'. In practice such restaurants generally wind up leaving some money on the table, no pun intended, and take the stability of always selling out over the potential of higher revenues.
I've come up with a variant on dutch auctions which solves this problem quite beautifully. The restaurant continues to charge the same amounts it does currently, with the same menu, but there's a 'seating fee' for sitting down which might be charged if the restaurant sells out in advance. The amount of the seating fee is determined by when the restaurant becomes completely booked, with the fee going down the later the selling out happens, possibly going down to zero at the end. By making a reservation when the potential seating fee is a certain amount, a customer is declaring that they're willing to pay the seating fee for that time period if it is necessary, but they aren't penalized for making an early reservation unless it would have been necessary to do an early reservation to get a seat. By waiting to make a reservation until later, a customer is declaring that they are unwilling to pay a higher price, but also allowing for the possibility that the restaurant will become fully booked and they won't get a seat. One of the nice features of this system is that the reservation system is essentially unchanged, allowing for trivial support of reserving particular time slots and tables.
This system also works for concerts and other events which have the potential to sell out.
India black markets in everything
A dirty little secret that most Indian politicians don't discuss is the thriving cow smuggling trade from their Hindu-majority nation, home of the sacred cow, to Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where many people enjoy a good steak. The trade is particularly robust around the Muslim festival of Eid.
India has outlawed cattle exports, but that hasn't prevented well-organized traffickers from herding millions of the unlucky beasts each year onto trains and trucks, injecting them with drugs on arrival so they walk faster, then forcing them to ford rivers and lumber into slaughterhouses immediately across the border.
The story is here. Here is information on the price differential:
A $100 medium-size cow in Jharkhand is worth nearly double that in West Bengal and about $350 in Bangladesh. Indian residents along the border complain that the markup also attracts illegal migrants from Bangladesh, who steal cows at night and dart back home.
In a bid to stem the rustling, the Murshidabad local government announced a cow-licensing system in 2007. Cows were issued photo IDs.
In theory the "border is sealed" but in reality the guards are often corrupt and accept bribes to allow the illegal migration.