Berlin 2016
 

UA 395 BWI ORD 1140 1246 738 2F

A big crush at the gate, mitigated by a mellifluous and
polite agent making making the announcements. For some
reason three people were called up to preboard, one of
them being myself.

Welcoming flight attendants, making one almost believe in
the "friendly skies." On the whole a pleasant flight though
in the clouds most of the time. Some of these runs have a
surprise meal catered, and I'd guessed this might be one
of them. No such luck: the usual snack basket only, whose
cheese Popchips were pretty tasteless and the Seneca apple
chips (now usually a favorite of mine) stale. We landed
5 early but sat around for half an hour as the plane at our
gate was disabled and could not be moved. They found us
another gate at the opposite end of the terminal.

UA 944 ORD FRA 1435 0555 772 7B

Mechanical - flight delayed 2 hours and change, so my
leisurely drink at the club turned out to be a bit more
than that. Substantial food, I guess you'd call it, with
some kind of pasta with numerous cheeses and a sweet
tomato sauce - I'm not sure about the pasta, because both
times I went by, it was out, there just being blobs of
cheese and sauce in an otherwise empty dish. I tried a
tablespoon of the residue and found it good.

The soups of the day were cream of broccoli and a sort of
bland chili con carne that was okay if you put pepper jack
in it.

Cookies (ran out quickly) and brownie bites (ditto) and
salad fixings (abundant).

I was lucky to find a seat at a deuce - various people
faded in and out of the other spot. The place was very
crowded; the recent refurnishing seems to have removed
seats rather than added them. The other B club was closed
for renos. There were various delays. All contributed to
the overuse of the space. But, hey, Budweiser longnecks
were free.

They solved our problem by swapping out planes, which
meant the pax had to trek down to C from the usual spot,
which was right outside the club. Ugly boarding area,
ugly boarding, ugly mood for the passengers who were more
cattleized than usual.

On the plane. A perfectly fine seat, well-modulated service
that fell short of being too chummy, thank goodness.

To begin
Chilled appetizer - Nori-wrapped smoked salmon with wasabi
mayonnaise

Less good salmon than usual - less oily I guess, and
why they had to disguise the fish with flavors that
didn't work ... I guess I answered that.

Fresh seasonal greens - Tomatoes, baby mozzarella, Kalamata
olives, cucumber and croutons with your choice of creamy
Gorgonzola dressing or balsamic vinaigrette

Less than fresh, but nothing to complain about.

Main course
Short rib of beef - Asian-style barbecue sauce, wasabi
grits and stir-fried vegetables

The usual meat cube had a blessed strand of fat running
through it - not exactly a real short rib, but better
than sometimes. The sauce tasted like Bull-Dog with
extra MSG; the vegetables were more like stir-boiled;
and the starch tasted like industrial chemicals. Why
wasabiize everything? with fake wasabi? There was a
fairly decent Guigal Cotes du Rhone - good enough that
I stuck with it for a couple months.

Spice-rubbed breast of chicken - Mustard barbecue sauce,
steamed rice, mixed vegetables and pickled cabbage

Fillet of Amazon cod - Mixed vegetable ratatouille

Tri-color ravioli - Cherry tomato saue, herbed butternut
squash and Parmesan cheese

To finish
International cheese selection - Grapes and crackers served
with Port

Dessert
Gelato with your choice of toppings

I passed on all the afters.

Prior to arrival
Fresh fruit selection - Served with granola, yogurt and
breakfast breads

And on this as well.

i had my passport when entering the country, of that
I am sure. Immigration was pretty quick, so I had a
good hour in the Senator lounge before boarding.

LH 178 FRA TXL 0945 1055 321 8E

I got the exit row aisle, which might have ended up
biting me in the butt, because there is no storage
at or above the row, so I had to store my bags a
good distance behind.

It was an insignificant flight, so far as I could tell.

I swam upstream a few rows and gathered up my stuff,
found the line for the bus ticket kiosk, bought my
6-day pass, and hustled to the Extremely Crowded X9 bus,
where I was lucky to find a seat. Got off at the zoo
and transferred to the S-bahn.

My room at the Hotel Carolinenhof was not ready, so I
stored my bags in the left luggage room and wandered
about Wilmersdorf. It was a seasonable, gorgeous day. I
walked past my friend Paule's apartment - it's amazing
that he's been gone for 5 years - and then wandered
through the fens that he used to walk his (nasty, bad-
tempered) dachshund in.

I returned an hour after the promised ready time and
was checked in expeditiously, only, uh oh, no passport
wallet. I mentally retraced my steps. There were a
dozen places I could have lost it or had it lifted. The
girl at the front desk was sympathetic but made me pay
in advance for the room, not the biggest of deals. Then
began a laborious process - contact the relevant police
stations (Wilmersdorf, airport), Lufthansa, the bus
authority, the Embassy, the Consulate, on and on.

Upshot - you have to make an online appointment at the
Consulate, but there weren't any available for three
weeks, so I asked the Embassy for advice, which was to
just show up anyway.

Having done everything I could, I joined my friend
Hans-Erich for dinner. Having a nice ironic sense of
humor, he took me to the Duke restaurant at the Ellington
hotel, which is a reputable haute place and despite the
silliness of the name offers Continental food in the best
of taste accompanied by easy listening pabulum music.

I just had a couple of appetizers.

Artichokes nori salad with foamed oyster veloute and
crispy shrimps - a wonderful dish, the freshest buds
cooked just so, the oyster presence more of a foam and
insignificant of texture but very oysterish in flavor.
Crispy shrimps were crispy blobs, very shrimpy in taste
but again counterintuitive in texture. One can just see
the weekly meetings of the brigade - how do we get that
elusive star? If your idea is selected, and we get that
star, you're fixed for life. Already the place has two
forks and spoons and the Michelin Plate, a new honor
above Bib Gourmand and below the famed rosettes.

I wanted an Oktoberfest, but that had ended the day before,
so I was served a Schultheiss Berliner Pilsner, which is
notable in that it is one of the few Pilsners that is worse
than the Weissbier offered by the same brewer.

Next, what was characterized as Fried duck liver with
mussels, Brunoise of potato and Passe Pierre seaweed. The
liver was of course foie gras, not the richest but pretty
close. The mussels were tiny, gamy, and extraneous, and I
am not sure why the seaweed. This was a rather small plate
but very rich, and I was well satissfied. though I continue
to shake my head about the combination, which cries out,
hey, Mister Michelin man, but in a language I and I believe
the Michelin man don't understand.

One of the conceits of the place is they have an ever-
changing wine inventory, which the sommelier sells on the
spot. I wanted a sweetish wine to go with my liver, a
combination that the young people at the restaurant
hadn't heard of. After some jawing about, in which the
staff and I both suspected translational issues, Hans-Erich
stepped in and described in no uncertain terms what I
wanted, whereupon they stepped up to the plate with a
Rheinhessen Riesling Kabinett 2010 that I didn't get the
details of, because after pouring me a taste for my
approval (it was sweetish, with the emphasis on the -ish,
quite honeyed and tropical and would have gone well)
discovered that was the tail end of the last bottle with
no more to be had. Whence they proceeded to the Ch. de
Ricaud (Loupiac) 2011 (or 12, they were vague on this), which
was moderately sweet, with lots of floral honey, rather like
a low-budget Sauternes and sort of okay with the liver.

Hans-Erich's meal -

Lukewarm trout with Fromage Blanc, flaxseed oil emulsion
and herbs - I tasted a smidge of this - it was reddish,
rather like a char, and tasted sort of salmony, very good.

Roasted saddle of venison with beetroot and vineyard peach
monochrome was a bit busy, very attractive though, medium-
rare and tender.

Short cake of plums with cooled almond Zacapa sabayon
and yeast ice cream - I didn't try this, but it was
pronounced good.

Throughout his meal Hans-Erich, who doesn't drink much,
nursed a glass of an off-the-menu Blauer Zweigelt that he
thought was pretty good. Okay, all the wines are off-the-
menu; this was more like a bin end.

Sorry, but IMHO long TRs without any reviving pictures or videos are just boring.

Then you are free not to read it.

I appreciate violist's reports.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand IQ points.

Consulate adventures.

I got there right at 9 - would have been earlier but went
on a wild goose chase for a Fotoautomat - every station
has one, but every one I saw was out of order. I eventually
gave up and headed straight there, taking the subway to
Oskar-Helene Heim and walking back a block toward the city.

The place has a fortress aspect and is guarded by some
rent-a-cops who, once they finished being fascinated by
a bunch of silly rules, were pretty helpful. I described
the situation and was led to the front of the line (most
people were looking for visas, so they were being given a
difficult time, and I'm betting it's going to get harder.
But I was in there pretty quickly and out a couple minutes
after 10 (the English of the guards gets better as you run
the gauntlet, and the one closest to the entrance is in
fact English English). It didn't hurt that I had done all
the paperwork, which got riffled through, and I was given a
half-hearted grilling and then was told to come back at 2.

Back to the hotel, took a bit of a walk as it was a somewhat
nice day, then back at 2 (the guard remembered me and let me
in early), and got this cute little one-year passport along
with an application for a free renewal (since I'd already
paid full boat).

Afterward I was kind of hungry, and there was this pizza
stand at the S-Bahn station that smelled pretty good.
Well. They probably spray pizza smell from an aerosol can.
The actual slice was almost completely tasteless, rather
like what you might have got back 50 or 60 years ago if
your mother was short of cash and sense and bought a box
of instant pizza for a dime or two at the supermarket
(this actually happened to me, once, around 1960).

As I'd budgeted all day for this, and it was 2:30, and
dinner at Hans-Erich and Christiane's was set for 7, I rode
the buses around and rubbernecked a bit. I've done the 100
and 200 tourist buses in the past, but riding the local
ones through the neighborhoods can be kind of interesting.

Over the years, I've stayed a few times with Hans-Erich
and Christiane, but she has a nephew using the spare room
at the moment, hence the hotel thing.

We started with a pleasantly biting Touraine Sauvignon
Blanc without so much pee in it - actually a lot of
tropical fruit aroma and some glycerin to balance out
the natural acidity. It was a pleasant but squash-heavy
meal; I was told that it was vegetarian day in the
rotation, how lucky was that, it happened only once
a week or so.

A curried pumpkin soup was quite good, something you
might see in a house-and-garden-type magazine. The
secret, and the saving grace of the dish, was that it
had been made with chicken stock.

The Meyer-Nakel Spatburgunder 2005 was very savory,
with plenty of spicy notes to go with the ripe (but
fading) fruit. A mature wine and a good match with
veggie food.

The next course was spaghetti with roast tomatoes,
carrots, olives, and zucchini. Mmm. I choked down my
serving of zucchini thinking "what a good boy am I"
and was rewarded by more. I sat back and thought of
England.

A shredded romaine salad with honeydew and avocado
was welcome relief.

Florida brand chocolate rum raisin ice cream was on
offer, and I demurred, saying I'd had enough food,
but Hans-Erich said that this ice cream company was
the only redeeming feature of Spandau - apparently a
grim town where he had been the chief of the psychiatric
department of the local hospital. After hearing that
recommendation I relented and accepted a small taste,
which was indeed quite good.

Noting my relatively nondairiness, Christiane sprung
to and made me a bowl of fresh raspberries and sliced
pear, garnished with some incredibly sweet Pinot grapes.

We talked unto the large hours, and Christiane said
good night as she had an early day, and Hans-Erich and
I chatted unto the small hours. My hotel was locked up
when I returned, but luckily there was someone in the
office to let me in.

I can´t see a plate is above Bib Gourmand;) Indeed a Bib Gourmand is only about value, a plate is the basic-rating (with excemption of gastro-pubs). Forks ans spoons are not related to the kitchen, they only about ambience.

All the suborders confuse me, the more there are the less attention I can pay.
Someday perhaps I shall study up on these, but meanwhile, your correction is
accepted.

Hans-Erich, having forgotten that we'd done these things
together years ago, decided to show me the sights. We
started at the Gemaeldegalerie, where the rotating
exhibition, entitled El Siglo de Oro, offered master
and some less master pieces of Velazquez, Zurbaran, and
El Greco, in a context of Spain as a world power in the
whatever it was, 16th and 17th centuries. We agreed to
meet outside and seek lunch at noon, but I regretted
that, wishing that we'd said 1 or 2 or even 3. As it was
I raced through the exhibition and barely had time to
soak in the atmosphere of one of the two Rembrandt rooms
(not a big thing - I'd seen almost all the works on a
previous trip and then at the traveling show when it was
at the National Gallery in London. I rushed through
efficiently enough that I had five full minutes to look
at the Cranach room and its collection of what Hans-Erich
calls "baroque pornography."

Well, as it turns out, Hans-Erich wasn't hungry, but I
asked him for recommendations of places to eat in
Wilmersdorf, so he admitted there was a joint nearby
that he liked to visit, and he spoke highly of the food
so I said, okay, I'll take you, and you can eat or not
eat as the spirit moves, so he said let's go, and off we
went. It turned out that on my wanders a couple days
before I had bookmarked a place with good Asianish
smells coming from it, for future reference. And that
this place and that were one and the same - Pho Bay,
right by the Blissestrasse U-bahn, and when we turned in
the door, Hans-Erich was greeted like a conquering king
by the hostess, who offered a spot right in front near
the door, where one could see and be seen.

We were just settled in when Hans-Erich muttered
something and went to the back of the restaurant - it
turns out that he'd seen Christiane having lunch with her
friend Jenny who had just returned from Kansas City, so
we relocated to their table and chatted about Kansas
City and serendipity among other things.

The ladies had eaten but stuck around with us sipping
tea until we'd had our lunch. Hans-Erich got tom kha gai,
and I had the special of the day, duck in red curry, a
large duck breast sliced to make it look even more
enormous and set over the usual vegetables - bamboo
shoots, red bell peppers, carrots, mushrooms, zucchini
(boo!), and one lonely snow pea. This was very authentic-
tasting once I put a teaspoon of hot pepper flakes in. I
could have been satisfied by half the portion and
wondered if I got extra by preferential treatment by
association. Or if I was witnessing the dissonance
between Thai food (the staff looked pretty Thai to me,
and the food tasted pretty Thai, despite the name of the
restaurant) and German portion size, so perhaps I was
getting the best of both worlds.

Quite good, quite reasonable in price, and the jasmine
tea was so strong it gave me a buzz for all afternoon.

So I went to the airport to inquire about the passport,
but the information guys hadn't seen it, so they sent
me to the police, who entered me in a database but hadn't
found it either.

I had just time to scamper downstairs and meet lili at
her gate, as my trip by public trans had taken longer
than Mr. Google Maps had said, plus there were the
police interviews, and her plane (KLM from Amsterdam
I think) had been right on time. We got ourselves
together and took the bus back to the Carolinenhof.

We'd arranged to meet some friends at Marjellchen,
which has a reputation for making the best possible case
for the local East Prussian cuisine, which is heavy,
creamy, lardy, and not that imaginative.

Because of the peculiarities of street numbering, the
restaurant is a block away from where one might think
it was - not a big deal, just a touch of adventure.

We were greeted by a very amusing stoutly good-humored
proprietress, who pointed us to a table already half
occupied by bdnyc and BOB W. Drinks and conversation.

bdnyc for some reason got hare with cherry sauce - I
had a taste, and it was pretty good, the sauce not
being too sticky nor too dominant.

"Riding Master" was BOB W's choice - it's essentially
breakfast for three or four, with eggs, sausages, pork,
and lots of potatoes. Apparently good wholesome stick-to-
the-ribs food but perhaps a little too Prussian, jawohl.

lili got the Schweinshaxe, which was pretty good, the
crisp skin a little dampened by a good-tasting but
supernumerary gravy. I'd have preferred the gravy on
the side.

As I knew I'd be getting some roast pork, I went for a
cheaper and I (foolishly) suspected smaller dish, ham in
cream sauce. It was simple and good and also enormous. I
managed to down most of it as well as at least a third
of lili's pig knuckle.

A Spatburgunder of no great pretentions, no great
distinction, and no great price. It did the job.

Beer was acceptable.

We'd ordered an appetizer, and it didn't come, but it
was charged for, so we called over the jolly proprietress,
and she cheerfully took it off the bill and by way of
atonement bought us a a round of Dutch-style gin, sticky,
thick, and aromatic.

We rolled out of there pretty happily.