Berlin May 2024 – REMI and otto

 

Veal croquette at otto

 

Berlin Trip: 23 – 27 May 2024
See also the posts on Berlin June 2023 for more food and travel and recommendations.

 

Whatever your budget, you can eat very well in cosmopolitan Berlin. In choosing restaurants, we avoided the two extremes of street food and ultra-luxe. I considered one particular Michelin-starred restaurant, which is also on the ‘world’s 50 best…’ list, where the proprietor seem to enjoy parading their noble thoughts throughout the whole website. In trying to be brutally honest, they have crept across the line into being rather pompous: a high-end take on Basil Fawlty. We live in strange times, if paying € 115 – €130 per person for dinner without drinks (it was €195 – € 225 per person before they lowered the prices, and number of fixed dishes, in April) comes with what I consider a head-bashing attitude. Nul points, as they say in the Eurovision Song Contest.

So on to the two dinners we really enjoyed: the staff were charming, the food was well-thought-out and delicious, the wine list was not over-extensive and scary, the other guests all seem to be enjoying themselves.

REMI has an enviable location right next to a metro station (U2 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), which made it very easy for us to get there. This is always a bonus at the end of long day walking. The bread from SOFI bakery was truly excellent, and I am going to start whipping my butter with olive oil for serving. By the time I had decided to put in an order for the kohlrabi tzatziki, the kitchen had run out of it.

 

REMI’s menu for May 2024

 

SOFI sourdough, olive oil butter

 

Moor carrots, sour cream, smoked ricotta, chives, mizuna

 

Smoked trout, grilled beans, sunflower seed tahini, sumac, parsley

 

Steamed arctic trout, pak choi, young potato, spinach

 

Venison kofte, beluga lentils, oregano onions, zhoug, feta

 

otto was the only restaurant we had dined at before, as I was so impressed with their beetroot I even attempted to make this at home. It is very easy to order at otto: simply pick out the items you do not fancy eating and then have everything else, so you won’t regret it later. Its location is also convenient, being a five-minute walk from U2 Eberswalder Straße station. We skipped dessert both times and had ice cream for dessert at Tribeca ice cream just around the corner. The only downside is that the restaurant is very small, so if possible opt for the earlier sitting (6pm – 8pm) and eat outdoors.

For the dish kohlrabi, vendace, lovage, vendace is a type of freshwater fish. I don’t recall any fish with the vegetables so I think the vendace might have been fermented and made into  sauce, in the manner that the chef also makes the fermented fish sauce garum for the dish with brook trout.

 

otto’s menu for May 2024

 

Sourdough bread with koji butter

 

kohlrabi, vendace, lovage

 

green asparagus, pumpkin seed mole, ramson

 

white pizza, fermented potato, cheese miso

 

venison, sugar snaps, jus

 

beetroot, sloe berry, labneh, brown butter

 

Bread at the other restaurants we ate in

Oh, Panama: their bread was from KEIT bakery served with leek butter. The food was very good but we had to rely on the specials board before we could find something we liked to eat, so this is risky. Oh, Panama is under the same umbrella as Katz Orange, which we enjoyed the previous year, but which we also found had limited choices on the menu to suit us.

Kochu Karu: instead of bread we tried a Korean tart flambée which was a flat bread with a topping of fried kimchi and grilled vegan cheese. It is not modern Korean (like Anju in Singapore) nor is it wholly Spanish. Save for the kimchi and bibimbap, the dishes were mostly Korean in name and Spanish in execution, so it seemed a bit confused to us.

 

Kochu Karu’s menu for May 2024

 

Finally, let’s learn some German. I looked at the KEIT bakery website and these are the words accompanying each loaf of bread:

zutaten = ingredients
herkunft = origin
gewicht = weight

brot = bread
brötchen = bread roll
brezel = pretzel

For our next trip I would like to revisit Chipperfield Kantine (closed on out visit), Night Kitchen (open only for dinner) and House of Small Wonder (for the biscuit Benedict and ricotta hotcakes). Eat more ice cream, and visit Markethalle Neun when the main food stalls are open.