Many words come to mind when you try to describe the new Anish Kapoor exhibition that opened at Martin-Gropius-Bau last Friday: spectacular, impressive, sensational, amazing, are only a few examples. All of these expressions have a special connotation and a second meaning when you dig a little deeper into their origins. All of these expressions also perfectly describe the experience of being inside this reinvented museum space, but leave you asking whether all of this is might be a little bit too much and a little too, well, spectacular.

The word spectacular comes from spectacle, which is a fitting analogy for Kapoor in Berlin. Let’s start at the beginning. In the light-flooded court from which you enter a series of rooms on the ground floor, four industrial ramps pierce through the ground, seem to break it (ground-breaking!), and transport massive briquettes of blood-red wax to the end of the ramp. There, these blocks predictably fall to the floor and thereupon slowly loose their original shape. The hollow bang of the wax piling up is a steady acoustic companion to the visitor. The longer the exhibition lasts, the bigger the piles will be and the more altered the court will look. The spectacle of Symphony for a Beloved Son (2013) was produced especially for the Berlin exhibition and gives you an impressive introduction to the work of Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor and his bold re-interpretation of sculpture.

Impressive comes from impression and, like the word spectacle, Kapoor takes his mission to create permanent impressions for his audience seriously. Specifically, you get the impression that Kapoor, together with curator Norman Rosenthal, tried to address as many senses as possible – since it’s a small step from sensual to sensational. Let’s stick with the sounds and the wax for a second: Shooting into a Corner (2008-9) was originally shown at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna in 2009 and later at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Experiencing this installation is so overwhelming to the senses that its performance can only be witnessed by wearing special earphones. A frightening canon, operated by a specialist, shoots blocks of red wax into a corner and sends loud explosions throughout the exhibition. The entire procedure takes only a second, and leaves the museum room messier than before. When bits of wax are flying through the air and the corner turns more and more into an artful site of massacre, you understand what curator Rosenthal means when he says that Kapoor in Berlin is a deconstruction of the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

The senses are further addressed when it comes to smell. Two newly made sculptures, First Body and Apocalypse and the Millenium both have a strong smell of the resin they were made of. The latter reminds you of the smell of almonds, maybe marzipan, or, as a friends of mine noted, amaretto. First Body, a massive three-part sculpture that was cut into pieces, evokes images of flowstone caves or a piece of petrified wood. You instinctively want to stick your head into one of the openings and take a deep breath of the unusual wax smell, just like you can’t help registering the plastic smell of all the chocolate-coloured PVC when it comes to The Death of Leviathan (2011-13). This truly monstrous plastic sculpture is so gigantic that it fills three rooms and makes it impossible to take in completely. After Shooting into the Corner, The Death of Leviathan feels like another, quite ironic and once again impressive, attack on the architecture that this exhibition is supposed to hold together. Size does matter and Kapoor demonstrates quite graphically that even a spacious house like the Gropius-Bau is bursting at the seams when it tries to host his artwork. Leviathan was originally the title of a 35-meter walk-in sculpture shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011. The rooms of the Gropius-Bau -that’s what the title might suggest- have killed the monster now by not giving it the space it needed.

But let’s return to our play on words and think about amazing for a moment. Kapoor in Berlin amazes you and is at the same time often not unlike a maze. Maze can be another word for labyrinth, which are often found at fairs where I remember getting lost as a child. I remember how the aisles of a house of mirrors deceived my perception at every corner. Kapoor’s mirror sculptures –kaleidoscopic concaves that are hanging on the wall – and his Non-Object sculptures (2008-13) give you a very similar impression. They work as performative sculptures in the sense that the visitor’s broken, enhanced, contorted, flipped, or multiplied image is produced through and with the physical presence of the spectator. There’s only reflection through interaction. “The kids will freak out,” a journalist exclaims at the preview on Friday morning. I remember that the kids, big and small, already freaked out three years ago when Olafur Eliasson turned the Martin-Gropius-Bau into a mirror maze, that – hard to believe in the face of such grandeur – makes Kapoor’s mirrors look old. But this is not a fair, but rather a fairly spectacular – and interactive – art exhibition and such comparisons might be, well, unfair.

The stress on the sensational also ignores Anish Kapoor’s great ability to construct the nothing. His genius in creating voids and black holes with his anti-sculptures brings you back to the idea of sensation, very similar to the twisted mirrors images in which you easily get lost. A 2013 re-enactment of his Descent into Limbo (1992) is nothing but a nothing, a negative, a mysterious hole in the ground, locked from the visitors by a glass balustrade. The description says that this hole consists of fibreglass and pigment, when it slowly dawns on you that this is not a hole but a sculpture – of sorts.

The idea of the sensational, the sensual, and the sensory also affects you with an immediate wish to touch everything you see – the stone, the cement, the pigment, the earth, the wax, and the PVC. On the busy opening night, the museum guards had no easy job trying to prevent visitors from grabbing the materials and thereby following the subconscious appeal of every sculpture that seemed to say, “Touch me, become a part of me!”

To say that an art exhibition is too spectacular suggests that art comes from that which is arduous and that fun physical adventures have no place in a museum. You might say about Kapoor in Berlin that the makers’ wish to impress is a more than obvious, but that would ignore the fact that Anish Kapoor’s sculptures have always been monumental and overwhelming. What remains is the impression that all of this is very impressive and sensational – and really pretty spectacular.

Kapoor in Berlin, May 18th – November 24th 2013
at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin
Opening hours: Wednesdays to Mondays 10am -7pm, closed on Tuesdays

Wim Wenders filmed the gorgeously makeup free Liv Tyler (yes.) remembering her first kiss while wandering through the wonderful ball room of Clärchen’s Ballhaus in Berlin Mitte. All produced to illustrate the sensual experience of Magnum Five Kisses edition, because ice-cream is seriously the next best thing when a kiss is not available.

[Post sponsored by Magnum]

I was on a fishing boat when I lost track of time and space. The dark swallowed me and night turned into day. I didn’t know whether I was sick or healthy, dreaming or working, whether I was hallucinating or wide awake. I became one with the ocean and its creatures which I killed every day. Its ghosts followed me from above and beyond, from up and down, from inside the water, and inside the boat. I had met Leviathan.

I wasn’t actually in a fishing boat and I hadn’t actually met the mythological creature from the deep seas. Instead, I was inside the black vaults of a cinema and got sucked into what I can only describe as the most exciting cinematic experience of my life.

It was at this year’s Berlin Film Festival that Leviathan spread its tentacles over the city, sliding along the borders of film, art, and installation, pushing its body into the cinema halls and out again, living in art spaces and vanishing back into the dark. Leviathan is not a film, but a physical experience that changes its shapes and overwhelms your senses.

Filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel spent a year on a fishing boat with fishermen off the coast of New England. When the shooting started, they lost their entire camera equipment to the wild waves of the ocean and had to start from scratch. This time, they made sure the cameras where safe by fastening them to the bodies of the fishermen and adjusting them to metal rods that would fly alongside the seagulls. They would tie a camera to a string and push it into the ship’s hold, in the midst of the haul, right into a pile of suffocating dying fish.

The small water- and shockproof GoPro-cameras that the filmmakers used were originally developed to film surfing competitions. Their extreme versatility allows the image to ignore all barriers that conventional camera equipment usually entails. This new vision, this new experience of being through seeing, is revolutionary. The camera is on its own mission most of the time, its images unleashed, unbound, unfettered. Arbitrary in its framing, overmastering in its power. The results took my breath away, made my heart race, made me seasick.

In the beginning, I was a fisherman. I looked into the abyss and all my eyes could see was the pitch-black night. I could only make out shapes in strangely exaggerated colours, but most of it was unrecognisable. Maybe I was too tired from hard work or maybe the complete loss of any feeling for time played tricks on my perception. There was only the ocean, and so I pulled up the nets and watched the fish thrash around until their lungs exploded. I didn’t care anymore. I just did my job.

There is a loss of control on a boat like this, Véréna Paravel reports after the screening. When she talks, you can feel that the shooting was difficult – personally, physically, and emotionally. Both she and co-director Lucien Castaing-Taylor were helping out the fishermen during the making of the film. Bound to the high seas on a small fishing boat for weeks, you slowly start to lose your mind, Paravel says. There is no privacy, no intimacy, no night, no day, no hours, no times, only the ocean and the constant noise of the machines.

The filmmakers sent out their cameras and used them as guinea pigs and explorers that then travel and dive or swim in pools of water amongst the remains of the once living catch. The cameras fly in the air, explore the ocean, get covered in starfish and clouded by fish blood, before the popped-out eyes of dead underwater creatures stare at them.

When I slipped out of my body, I flew alongside the birds above the ship. I bumped into a seagull, glided along in the cold winds, and then suddenly flew upside down. I crashed into the waves and stayed in the cold water not knowing why. I re-emerged and went under again and had finally lost all control over movement and direction, over purpose, life, and death. Leviathan had gotten over me.

I closed my eyes. I heard splashing and roaring, squishing and rumbling, screams and the dull sounds of the underwater world.

Leviathan is not a documentary film, it’s a happening. It’s physical and metaphysical at the same time. It’s a non-narrative and experimental experience in amazement at 24 frames per second. But Leviathan also changes its shape, reduces its speed, and shifts its habitat and name.

When Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel worked on the film in post-production, they discovered something mysterious in their material. Sparks or splashes, something unnameable, or some kind of ghost appeared in the frames. The filmmakers extracted the material that was shot in between sky and ocean and slowed it down to one frame per minute. They named it Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan With A Hook? and He Maketh a Path to Shine after Him; One Would Think the Deep to be Hoary and showed in at various new spaces for Forum Expanded at the Berlin Film Festival this year.
The Last Judgement was an installation that projected seagull images into the cross vault of a former crematorium in Wedding. The six-hour version He Maketh a Path to Shine after Him; One Would Think the Deep to be Hoary was cut into pieces and shown for two hours every day at the Arsenal 2. It will now be reinstalled for a day in its entirety.

I was shaken, I was breathless, my lungs still filled with water, my face covered in blood and the smell of fish. The lights went on and I returned to some sort of reality. My friend and I walked out of the cinema, both speechless. A day later she said: “You could tell me it was 30 minutes long or that it went on for hours – I would believe anything.” We planned to go back into the darkness and into the madness as often as we could. We both needed to meet Leviathan again.

Leviathan, USA/UK/France 2012, 87 min.

director, cinematography, editing, production, script: Lucien Castaing-Taylor und Véréna Paravel, languages: no dialogue (bits of English), distribution: arsenal distribution
Berlin screenings: Fsk, Brotfabrik (both 23.05.-05.06), arsenal (25.05.), Downstairs im Filmcafé (29.5-12.06), Tilsiter Lichtspiele (20.06-03.07.)

He Maketh a Path to Shine after Him; One Would Think the Deep to be Hoary, USA/UK/France 2012, 360 min, Berlin screening: Arsenal, May 23rd, 7 pm

We give away 2×2 free tickets for the screening of Leviathan at Arsenal this Saturday, May 25th, 7.30 pm. Send an email to toby@stilinberlin.de, subject line: Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Tell me why you want to encounter Leviathan. The most original answer wins (and will be published). Deadline today, May 23rd, 6 pm.

Discover This! is a weekly Berlin–based film comment.

Berlin’s vegan food scene is expanding, for sure, but if you ask me, it’s not even close to being satisfying. I still didn’t find a close-by joint for green smoothies in Mitte, the fine-vegan-dining scene is almost non-existent (with Lucky Leek and La Mano Verde being the only ones on my to-test-list). And most delis are serving fast food like vegan burritos or vegan burgers. Not exactly what I’m looking for.

But, one more spot of vegan delicacies is filled now: there’s a vegan frozen yoghurt joint. Schuchmanns just recently opened and offers frozen yoghurt in normal and vegan variety, as well as some at least delicious looking cakes. Officially it’s not called vegan froyo, but soy ice-cream, rest assured, it’s exactly that and much more. Most froyo places in Berlin decided to serve the froyo literally topped with extras, placing chunky bits of cookies or fruit on top of it. Which thanks to my clumsiness, makes big parts of the topping in the end land on the floor instead of in my mouth.

Schuchmanns features a giant machinery, that merges toppings and frozen yoghurt, creating a soft mix of whatever you choose. Pictured above are blackberry and walnuts on the right, and raspberries and mangos to the left. The latter was the more convincing combination since it actually managed to leave no trace of any soy-like taste, which still made its way through the blackberry-walnut mix, although I didn’t find it disturbing.

The location of the café at Paul-Linke-Ufer includes a beautiful little garden with white furniture and of course the possibility to devour your treat in the sun by the canal. Service must still be called bumpy, though, but I’m confident they’ll manage to offer a smoother process as soon as everything found its place. I didn’t try any of the cakes, but hey, they certainly looked delicious.

Berlin has a nice choice of Asian food stores, with some being better, some being worse. This one deep in the west of Kantstraße is outstanding, though. You even get the bubbles for your home-made bubble tea.

Besides all the staples of an Asian food store, like a variety of soy sauces, and a humongous shelf filled with endless instant noodle packages, they feature the biggest variety of Kimchi and fresh Asian vegetables and herbs I’ve seen in Berlin so far. As well as a very good selection of everyday ceramics, a nice choice of rice from every Asian country and loads and loads of mochi flavors.

The interior is not remarkably different from any other Asian food store, while the size of the store is certainly bigger than most. Which makes it possible to have rows and rows of freezers filled with Asian delicacies going way further than just Edamame or dumplings, offering something as common as Edamame as well as dozens of unknowns for the adventurous.

One can spend a long time here, even if you’re life currently doesn’t leave time or space to cook at home, it serves as a perfect inspiration. And then there’s the Kimchi. I’ve been a fan ever since I encountered this wonderful spicy pickled cabbage and Amazing Oriental has the best selection. Because Kimchi can basically be chili pickled everything, radish or even water spinach.

What makes it different from many other Asian stores it’s that it’s not as Thai centered but offering loads of Chinese goods like a big selection of noodles and dried goods, as well as Indonesian and Indian spices. Don’t miss out, when you’re around Kantstraße.

There’s no way to satisfyingly describe the biggest bazar of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in words. At least I can’t find one. It’s soo big, soo colorful, soo varied. The offered goods range from cheap plastic to home-farmed super sweet strawberries, from weird icon-carpets made in China, to elaborately embroidered jackets, from intensely scenting garlic to brightly sparkling jewelry.

The bazaar is stretched over countless halls and streets with the giant hall of intensely colored spices and dried goods (an Kurt, a dried cheese speciality), topped with a green dome, being the center. What Tashkent’s new city lacks in actual public life, Chorsu compensates for. Every day, farmers from outside of Tashkent travel to Chorsu to offer their goods in the already relentless heat of May. The abundance of sun in Uzbekistan (300 days of sunshine a year, take that, Berlinowic) makes the produce ultra-delicious. The sweet scent of strawberries and the delicious taste of tomatos here is so intense, it makes you wanna faint (when thinking about the German quality).

The halls are filled with customers and sellers, boys moving carts, and young ones running in between stands. Most of the farmers are from Uzbek origin and don’t necessarily speak Russian, while many customers from the new parts of the city don’t necessarily speak Uzbek, although it’s teached in school since first grade. It’s a total clash and also a good lesson about the Uzbek society. I was quite surprised to learn, that in Uzbekistan your “ethnicity” or “origin” is mentioned in your passport, while everyone is Uzbek by nationality, their origin is mostly either Uzbek, Russian, Korean or Armenian. Uzbek are by far the majority in this country, although for instance almost none of my students were Uzbek and there were no Uzbeks in the clubs and bars we went to after sunset. I heard, Uzbek are far more conservative, and I also learnt how big the resentments in between the several ethnicities can be.

I came to Chorsu with the students of my photography workshop and wanted to include the pictures of one of them, Komila Rakhimova, here. They are marked in the caption.

Just behind the big dome is the food bazaar, or food market. Where vendors yell their offered dishes to get your attention and we went to have lunch. Chorsu Bazaar is located around Chorsu Metro Station and is also a stop of many busses. Or just get a taxi. It happens every day.

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.

The first thing that surprised me was how lusciously green the inner center of Tashkent is, lots of parks, trees, and perfectly cut lawns line the wide streets, giving the city quite a natural feeling and somewhat tempering the already very hot temperatures around 36 degrees. Although water isn’t a good that’s abundant in Uzbekistan, the city’s government obviously decided it’s important to have a very green city center and most of these parks are artificially watered every day. Most of it is also only meant to be looked at instead of used, so unlike in Berlin you won’t see families having a picnic, let alone a barbecue, or someone having an afternoon nap in the shadow of a tree or even walking past a lawn.

As I mentioned, the streets here are wide, humongous, really. Now, I expected to see wide streets — they’re a common feature of Soviet city planning and were implemented here after a disastrous earthquake in 1966 — but although traffic in Tashkent is quite busy, the roads are never filled to capacity. The few drivers around are not really concerned about pedestrians’ safety, but as most streets are not jammed, I’ve not yet encountered any seriously dangerous situations. There seems to be no alternative to either option, as both biking and rental bikes have recently been forbidden (!?).

Still, getting around is fairly easy, even for tourists: if you don’t use the beautiful and well working metro (where photography is absolutely not allowed), you can just wait on the curb for someone to stop (mostly Daewoo Matiz drivers), name your goal and price (about 3000 Sum, or 1 Euro) and the driver will decide if he can or will take you. Everyone does it, groups of people, men and also single women, Uzbeks or even the German and French women working at the embassy. It’s completely normal.

The center of Tashkent is dominated by the giant Amir Timur Square with the Timur equestrian statue in the middle, circled by Hotel Uzbekistan (my hotel — four stars that must have been mainly awarded to the beautiful facade structure) and the Timur museum. Amir Timur, a 13th-century warrior, was installed as a kind of forefather of the Uzbek nation at the beginning of the 1990s to replace the Soviet symbols and historiography. What also disappeared in the 1990s were most of the big trees on the square, turning it into a unbearably hot, and thus deserted, spot in summer months with little shadow. Except the few obvious tourists, there’s no one around.

Departing from Amir Timur Square is “Broadway”, a wide pedestrian street lined with parks and trees that used to be filled with small shops and cafés and which was crazily busy until those mostly illegal businesses were removed 10, 15 years ago and the area was (once again) turned into a lonely street with only few spots to stop left. It left me confused why a city’s government would decide to re-design and clean up the city’s center only to leave it deserted and empty.

The main attraction, though, is Independence Square, a giant area with several ministries as well as the senate, and several crazy monuments. Another gigantic fountain (the city is full of fountains), for instance, a huge arcade structure topped with silver birds as symbols of independence, or the giant golden globe showing a map of Uzbekistan that replaced the tallest statue of Lenin in the Soviet Union (30m tall). Although the ever-present water features and fountains cool things down a bit, the heat is seriously too much without any high trees providing shadow and thus we happily fled to the Anhor canal just beyond the square.

The canal is used for swimming and is also a preferred spot for dating for the young people of Tashkent, with girls in nice dresses and make-up and boys trying to impress them. In summer, when temperatures here reach over 40, sometimes even 50 degrees, the canal and its bridges are crowded with students seeking some cool relief.

We ended our tour with a typical Uzbek lunch by the canal. Now, Uzbek kitchen is mainly focussed on meat and meat only. You get it grilled, mostly as a shashlik (kebab), either minced or in bite-sized piece. A national dish is plov, a mixture of rice, vegetables, meat, and boiled egg. Also served are salads, most of them with mayonaise, but then the fresh cucumbers and tomatoes with herbs are so delicious, one can well live off those alone. They are as fresh and tasty as the local strawberries and cherries, bursting with flavor, so sweet and enjoyable.

Coming up: Chorsu bazar and many pictures of cherries, strawberries, mulberries…

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.

Paul, Sebastian, and Tom are the little knights of this real-life fairy tale. They come from different backgrounds, different lives, and different families. Paul is big boy. He has a large family and watches life and death on the farm. His daddy is in the hospital and he has problems at school. Sebastian is a little dreamer and loves fighting with his little brother more than paying attention to his math homework. At school, the girls interrogate him thoroughly about which girls he likes and which he does not. Tom has two mommies, but he also has a daddy who comes to visit him regularly. Tom reads the newspaper, makes coffee, and is very alert. He is a pretty child, but he’s afraid of the dark. Tom is sure that the grown-ups have stopped playing because work and housework got in their way.

It’s not easy being a child, but it’s also not easy to make a good film about the experience of being a child. When watching MansFeld, I was thrown back into my own childhood, not because the stories are necessarily similar to mine, but because the film captures the moments of growing up so delicately and sweetly and, therefore, universally. Director Mario Schneider, who -together with Florian Kirchler -is also responsible for the camerawork, has the open eyes of someone who doesn’t know yet how boring, stressful, and bleak being an adult can be.

All senses are alert: Peng! Peng! Peng! Peng! We hear the whips being lashed and we wonder what they will be used for. The sound of this weapon is more reliable than the sound of words for a kid like Paul – his Saxon accent fails him at school when he turns all the “t”s into “d”s and his mother threatens to cancel the holidays. Some cruelties are serious for a child, others become banal in the everyday routine. To exsanguinate and skin a rabbit is no biggie, when you’re used to it. The death squeal of a gigantic pig might me a little frightening, but less so for the children watching than for someone who has never witnessed a live butchering before.

While the camera observes with great interest and even greater patience, the omniscient narrator is on holidays. I was almost waiting for the reassuring voice of an old man to tell me the story, but mind you, this fairy tale is real, despite all its enchantedness. As we become companions to our little princes on this journey back to childhood, we grown-ups get the chance to reconsider some of the politics we discuss wholeheartedly now that we think we are wiser. Can two women raise a child? Why don’t we ask little Tom, who looks like he couldn’t be happier with the attention he gets from mom, her girlfriend Steffi, and dad. Is it fair that in our goal-oriented society all children are treated as if they had the same educational and class background? When Paul fails at school, it doesn’t seem to be his fault so much, but in the end it’s him who’s suffering. These ideas are marginal notes in the film, but they expand the wonder of childhood towards the realities of being an adult.

Some of those responsible for the magic of MansFeld are no less than Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Igor Strawinsky, whose orchestrations add dramatic force and a hint of mystery to the tale of three boys and their town. They do it sparsely but effectively and, as much as I hate dominant music scores in documentary films, here, it couldn’t add more perfectly and magically to the real life drama.

The grand finale of the film is the celebration of Whitsuntide (Pfingsten) where all of Mansfeld turns into a whimsical spectacle of costume and ancient ritual. You finally discover the symbolic function of the whip, and gape with open mouth and wide eyes at the ethnographically documented festivities that involve colourful disguises, fancifully decorated vehicles, and lots of mud. By this point in the film, you wonder if what you see is real or not.

The fairy tale of childhood closes with a group of kids looking into the camera like the passers-by from the 1926 archive footage of the town’s people. Like childhood itself, you wish that this fascinating and utterly charming little film about the little people of the world would never come to an end.

MansFeld, Germany 2012, 98 min.
director: Mario Schneider, cinematography: Florian Kirchler/Mario Schneider and Peter Badel/ Thomas Plenert (2nd Unit), languages: German, distributor: 42film

Berlin screenings: Hackesche Höfe, Fsk, Babylon Mitte
Special screening with director Mario Schneider present: Tonight, Thursday May 16th, 8 pm, at Hackesche Höfe

To win 3×2 tickets for the special screening tonight at Hackesche Höfe, send an email to toby@stilinberlin.de (until 4 pm), subject line: fairy tale.
First come, first served: the first three emails win. The screening will be in German, no subtitles.

Discover This! is a weekly Berlin–based film comment.

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.

It shares the name (but nothing else) with another highly acclaimed Japanese place in Mitte, Cocoro Ramen, where a ridiculously delicious Ramen soup is served, but it’s so small and ever so crowded, the owner actually asked me to not review it.*
Cocoro on Mehringdamm furthermore joined forces with a specialist in Japanese pastry shop, Nazuna on Danziger Straße, serving for example their highly praised Yuzu cake.

I went to Cocoro during Gallery Weekend, after visiting Galerie Neu’s breathtaking Altbau apartment in which they currently present Nick Mauss. Although the deli is located on a very busy street, I opted to sit outside like every Berliner as soon as temperatures rise above 10 degrees, and ordered a portion of Edamame and a Kitsune Udon with seaweed and sweet tofu. Both of it was delicious, to say the least, although Smart Deli’s broth remains unbeaten to me.

I also ordered a Matcha Latte, and despite being a small cup, the green milk drink was just a little too much. Nevertheless very tasty, Matcha Latte can quickly turn out being too tart or being oddly sweet and this one was nicely balanced.
I have a special soft spot for Japanese plates and bowls, they never seize to amaze me in their ability to actually serve as a visual completion to the food. The Edamame served in a wooden bowl made them look even greener and more mouth watering, and the many brown colors of the soup bowl repeated as well as contrasted the broth and vegetables. And then I just like the prettiness of carrots cut in flower-shape.

Cocoro is a perfect addition to the lunch places in this area, so if you’re there, don’t miss out!

*You might ask, why I mention it now. Turns out, I’ve been the only one listening to his plead, the place has been in every guide you can name and thus always has a line – outside (and I mean always as in also during the minus-ten-degrees of the past winter). Means one has to wait an average of 20 minutes to enjoy your soup in a completely crowded inside.
As a little reward for reading through the whole article, even this appendix, I hereby reveal that the team behind cocoro ramen will actually open a spacier location in Kreuzberg in June. I can assure you I am working very hard to be their first guest and then inform you here.

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.

He literally went there days and days in a row, sometimes having a day’s lunch as well as dinner and raved about their offerings. I generally trust his judgement, and him saying he’s kinda obsessed with their menu, especially the fermented shrimp sauce served to the pork noodles, obviously this place has more on offer than just a fancy interior. We went there on a Thursday evening and the place was quite filled. Only open for a couple of weeks, Carson told me they already replaced the low stools and tables for “normal” height ones, since not enough customers seemed to be fine with eating their food close to the ground.

The menu is exciting, to say the least. They offer the safe options like summer rolls, spring rolls and a number of Phở Bò variations with either half-done beef, well-done brisket, beef balls or a mysterious special (Ɖặc biệt) for a Euro more than the rest (9,50 Euros). But then the specials take over, with grilled chicken feet being one of the more common ones. The menu mainly features small dishes around 5 Euros with such delicacies as stir fried frog with lemongrass and red pepper, eel stewed in coconut milk with glass noodles and mushroom, deep fried pork legs or deep-fried silkworm with butter. The latter was still too much for Carson though, if one of you ever tries it, don’t forget to send me a review!

And then there are the dishes for more than one person, like the whole steamed chicken with beer and rice congee soup (25 Euros), or the fish hot pot, served with loads of greens and very fresh looking fish pieces. One will certainly need more than one visit to pay the whole menu tribute, but we tried at least by ordering several of the small dishes, with me sticking with the vegetarian options like a very nice and fresh sour mango salad, the summer rolls and fried rice paper with egg. While the summer rolls were not very outstanding, the salad and the rice paper were surprising in taste and crunch and I can certainly recommend both. Carson went for the frog, already a favorite of his, and the beef in vine leafs.

District Mot aims high in terms of authenticity and being regardless of any food-conventions Asian food has suffered from too long in Europe. And I highly appreciate that and think it should be rewarded. There are still some struggles, like inconsistencies in the service. The menu could surely use some more guidance from the waiters. The more familiar Vietnamese dishes don’t necessarily exceed (but also don’t fail) the quality of other joints, and the desserts we chose of the very vast dessert menu were not our taste. Nevertheless, you should go and try it yourself, and if it’s only to finally cross frog or silk worms off your to-eat-list.