While on our usual Saturday walk last weekend, we decided to grab a quick bite to eat at a new takeaway called Mi Bao. I'd absentmindedly snapped a photo of the advertisement for "bao" outside of the door earlier in the week, and though restaurants have a habit of staying on our list for weeks (if not months) before we get around to visiting them, something about Mi Bao's promise of "Asian street food" made it seem like a more worthwhile place to revisit...
I swear I've been living here for almost four years, but somehow Heilige Drei Könige (translation: Three King's Day or Epiphany) caught me off guard. Here in Baden-Württemberg it's a federal holiday, meaning that everything (i.e. the grocery store) is closed on that day. And because we've been shopping daily for our meals since we moved to Germany, that meant that on Wednesday we were left without food in our tiny apartment fridge for dinner. Our solution? Look at our "Restaurants to Try" list, of course. And what piqued our interest the most? Burgers from Triple B -- Beef Burger Brothers...
The Monday after Christmas, my mother and I decided to brave the post-holiday sales crowds in order to do a little shopping of our own and explore some areas of Stuttgart that she hadn't seen yet. Though I know that the new Milaneo complex by the library is quite popular, I much prefer the other new shopping mall at at the far end of Königstraße called Das Gerber. The mall is smaller and thus much more manageable, in my opinion, and there are several new stores there that I like. Apart from that, Das Gerber also houses our local Pano...
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...
People have been telling me for over a year now that Alaturka is the place to go for a kebab in Stuttgart. Maybe it's because I have trouble justifying going out to dinner for a kebab (I think of it as I'm-too-lazy-to-cook-food or I'm-hungover-food) or maybe it's because we've been so satisfied with our local kebab shop, but whatever the reason, I hadn't made it to Alaturka until last weekend when my husband suggested it.
And so, after a lazy, relaxing Saturday catching up on TV shows and reading, we finally bundled ourselves up against the cold and walked down the hill towards Olgastraße. We hadn't walked far before my husband said we'd arrived and opened up a low door into a rustic, almost cave-like interior. The stone walls were lined with wooden shelves piled high with Turkish trinkets and various bottles of spices and wine. It would have been dark except for the large center island finished with bright blue tiles...
One difference that continues to fascinate me between eating in Germany and the United States are the delivery places here. In the US, we usually ordered delivery from our favorite Chinese restaurant or pizza parlor, where they specialized in one kind of food or at least one food from one region. In Germany, however, (or at least in Stuttgart) this is not the case. Delivery places seem to specialize in "delivery food", meaning anything from Asian noodles to Mexican tacos (or so they claim).
I remember the first time we tried to order pizza in Stuttgart. We had just moved into our apartment, and our kitchen was yet to be delivered from IKEA. (Yes, you have to supply your own kitchen -- sink, fridge, oven, etc. -- when you move into a German apartment.) We decided to try a pizza place that we saw advertised on our street called Sky Pizza. To our surprise, Sky Pizza served not only pizza, but also American burgers, German maultaschen and schnitzel, "International" fish and chips and chicken wings, Mexican tacos and quesadillas, Indian curries, Chinese noodle and rice dishes, and even beer and wine. We were obviously very excited. Who wouldn't want quesadillas and chicken masala all in one meal?...
I've found that Germany isn't big into fast food in quite the same way as the States. I remember when I was little, if we had a busy day running errands, we'd often stop at Wendy's or Burger King for a quick bite. When I moved to Virginia, our choices switched to Chic-fil-a and Raising Cane's. And of course there was the ever ubiquitous McDonald's. It was easy: you simply drove down the highway or main road into town, and it seemed that there were at least five or six fast food options along the way.
Not so in Germany. Sure, there are a couple of McDonald's locations on Konigstraße and one Burger King location. But if you want to find KFC, then you have to go out of your way. And Taco Bell? Only if you have access to one of the American military bases. Otherwise, that's it. And while I see lots of young kids at the McDonald's, fast food joints just really aren't a big deal here.
So what do Germans do when they are hungry on the go? Well one option is a döner kebab. I've blogged about it before. They're cheap and delicious, and make for great drunk or hangover food. But what if you don't want a kebab? Then where do you go? To the bakery, of course...
One of the first things we discovered when we moved here is that fast food doesn't exist in the same way it does in the States. Rather than getting fast food from a pizza place or a Chinese place, most strictly "take out" places here have everything all-in-one. You'll find burgers next to tacos next to Indian food, all on the same menu, and sadly, none of it's very good from our experience so far. There is one fast food, however, that I've come to love: döner.
The döner kebab consists of meat carved from a giant spit of various kinds of pressed meat, usually lamb and beef. The meat is shaved off and added to a pita with various toppings. I've heard various stories about the döner being Turkish and about it being created by a German Turk, thus making it part of German cuisine. Either way, it's good, and I've seen döner shops in several countries around Europe.
