German cuisine

Boiled pig's knuckle with sauerkraut is probably not everyone's idea of a great meal. I happen to like it, though I would never call it a great meal. It's a traditional German dish and I had a plate of it in Berlin during my recent trip.

I thought I would be posting often about wonderful culinary experiences. Alas, there were none. At one point, the group of American journalists I was with got a tour of Kreuzberg by a German-Turkish candidate for parliament that ended in a very nice Turkish restaurant, Hacir, where we got huge plates of mezzes followed by huge plates of kebabs. I joked with our host that we would go back to the U.S. after 10 days in Germany and tell everyone our best meal was at a Turkish restaurant.

More or less true. We had a nice meal in the executive dining room of Deutsche Bank (pumpkin soup with a kind of balsamic vinegar emulsion, saddle of venison with nice root vegetable sides, and a mocha and chocolate dessert). We had another nice meal in the "press club" that Axel Springer created for his employees (no menu, but it seemed to be a carrot-ginger soup, a variation of geschnetzeltes -- a kind of veal stroganoff -- and a dessert I've forgotten).

Otherwise, we had a succession of mediocre to bad meals -- a bland venison dish at a traditional Gastaette in the Ore Mountains, a so-so pork neck at the dreadful Kartoffelhaus in Freiberg, and so on. A very classy wine tasting at Eltville am Rhein was followed by dinner at the mayor's house -- and it was very kind of him and his wife to host us -- that featured a version of chicken nuggets that may have come from the German equivalent of Costco.

I should not have been surprised. Germans have never placed great value on the quality of food, and the price-quantity relation is the most important in choosing a restaurant. I know there are good restaurants in Germany but the revolution we have had in the U.S. thanks to Alice Waters and crew seems to be not nearly as widespread in Germany as it is here. I enjoyed my plate of matjes herring and boiled potatoes at a little terrace table in Berlin's Nikolai Quarter, but it's a dish that has been unchanged for literally centuries.

Germany is a conservative society that doesn't much care for revolutions and the cuisine is no exception to that rule.