This past week a new colleague of mine threw a birthday part at Breitengrad 17, a Vietnamese restaurant downtown (déjà vu, anyone?). The restaurant has been on our list to try for some time, but with Takeshii's being one of our long-time favorites, we've usually just gone there instead. However, with such a great opportunity, we couldn't turn it down...
I mentioned Takeshii's a while back in my post on the Bohnenviertelfest, but I've been meaning to devote a full post to it for a while now. Finally the opportunity arose this past weekend when a friend of mine decided to host her birthday party there. Since Takeshii's is one of my neighborhood favorites, I couldn't turn her down.
We met for a late dinner outside the restaurant in the Bohnenviertel. The restaurant sits in a corner spot halfway between the Charlottenplatz and Rathaus U-bahn stations and up a flight of stairs. The interior is beautifully decorated with greenery and flowers all around, a stunning black bar, gold detailing in the ceiling and walls, and giant floor-to-ceiling photos of tattooed men that add just a bit of an edge to the space...
Since it's Saturday night, we wanted to try a new Mexican restaurant for dinner tonight, but it was booked. No matter -- we opened up our list to find another casual restaurant in the area. Our selection? DO's Vietnamese Street Food.
Matt first found DO's on one of our many walks through the city with Leo. It's located between the new Gerber mall on Tübinger Straße and the main shopping street of Königstraße. Much of the area was closed when we first moved here for construction, but now that it's finished, I feel like we're rediscovering all the new shops and restaurants there, DO's being one of them...
Despite my love of dining out, I often cook at home. Not only do I enjoy cooking, sometimes it's the only way to get some authentic dishes from home (like American pork lo mien, Mexican fajitas and tacos, New Orleans gumbo, and Texas chili) and some dishes that you can never find in a restaurant (like my mom's spaghetti). Lately I've been making an effort to try more Japanese dishes like the ones we ate on our trip to Japan. I've found a great Japanese-American blogger from the San Francisco bay area who writes on Just One Cookbook. So far, I've made tsukemen, soba noodles, and ochasuke, and I recently tried katsu curry (see some pictures at the end of this post).
These recipes often require ingredients that can't be found in my neighborhood grocery store. The Edeka where I shop does have a small Asian aisle, but most products are from the standard Bamboo Garden brand (although Edeka recently started stocking panko breadcrumbs and miso paste -- I was impressed!). When I need more exotic ingredients, like real ramen noodles, soba noodles, chili bean paste, dried bonito flakes, mentsuyu (a soup base), and narutomaki (a kind of fish paste), then I head to the Asian market...
