I am currently staying in Tashkent to teach a class on street photography together with French photographer Cyril Robin, a joint project of the German and French embassies here. As I’d never been to Uzbekistan or any other Central Asian country before, I was beyond excited to come here and have been delighted ever since. This country fuses so many different influences – though the official language Uzbek is a Turkic language (related to Turkish, yes, but also Kazakh and Siberian dialects) everyone also speaks Russian, the food is a mixture of arabic, turkish and russian cuisine, as is the architecture, and Tashkent’s inhabitants descend from Uzbeks, Russians, Koreans, and Europeans. While I spend most of the time with my more than lovely students, I luckily had a little time off yesterday to do some sight-seeing.
If you want to follow me in almost-real-time, check my stilinberlin profile on instagram.
Mansfeld is a small town in Saxony-Anhalt near the Harz Mountains. It has approximately 9,600 inhabitants and apparently Martin Luther spent a big part of his childhood there. Mansfeld used to be a mining town and has 15 different districts. I researched all of this because, quite frankly, I was sure that Mansfeld didn’t exist. Not only had I never heard of it before, but after watching Mario Schneider’s documentary film, I was convinced that this place, its people, and rituals existed only in the fantasy of their children and were nothing but a beautiful fiction.
Honestly, I am very delighted by the continuing growth of the Japanese deli-scene in Berlin. It makes lunch just so much more easy, because although daily Käsespätzle might be delicious, they certainly don’t bring the same health-value like a light Japanese lunch. For which we’ve got delicious Udon soups at Smart-Deli, very enjoyable Bento boxes at Mamecha and Nazuna and let’s not forget the lunch options at the restaurants Sasaya and Hashi. One of the newest to join is cocoro, a small place on Mehringdamm.
When it comes to restaurant-launches in Mitte these days, many of the new joints feature a way more styled interior than one is used to from the past years, when it’s been enough to create a living room-like atmosphere. A pioneer of this have always been the restaurateurs behind the Vietnamese restaurant group of Si An Trà Café, Chén Chè Tea House and Chi Sing restaurant and they’ve proven their tendency for innovative and creative interior design once again with their newest place called District Mot. It’s located in the former space of Chi Sing, which has been closed to be entirely restyled to resemble a Vietnamese street food parlor, complete with colorful plastic stools, plastic baskets with spicy sauces and toilet paper as napkin suspenders on each table. While it definitely earns points for creativity and effort, the food has received mixed reviews, tending towards the negative with some of my friends. Until I received a message from Carson Chan, in which he was beyond excited about this addition to the Mitte food scene.
I’ve had the idea of portraying chefs in their home for quite some time, there are so many people creating beautiful food but they don’t necessarily have or sometimes don’t even want a restaurant. I am very happy about the developments in the Berlin foodie scene and a growing and thriving scene of private chefs is a convincing proof for an enjoyable process. The first one in a hopefully long going series of portraits of chefs, is Daniel Groethus and his supper club and catering service Daniel’s Eatery.
