My Mom’s side of the family is rural German and I fondly recall dinners of my childhood for which she’d make cabbage rolls and sauerbraten, and roulades fashioned from thin-sliced beef rolled up with bacon and a dill pickle.
Yesterday, Gridskipper ran a list of the scant few German restaurants in New York, and reading it, I realized I hadn’t yet been to a German restaurant yet in New York, so I gave Hallo Berlin a go. In addition to many stray umlauts, it serves a cornucopia of wurst, including the prefixes weiner, Alpen, bock, knock, bauern, brat, curry and liver.
I gave their roulade a try and it was bland and sopped in a sad brown gravy. The spaetzle was greasy and flavorless and the red cabbage and string beans on the side tasted fresh-from-the-can. It wasn’t all a bust, as my large glass stein of Köstritzer black beer had a pleasantly sticky-sweet bitterness about it. It seemed like bar food, although the staff and regulars were pleasant. The bunch of delivery guys at the bar were engaged in a long and heated discussion about the film versions of American Psycho and Trainspotting versus the book versions. The consensus reached was that the books are more graphic and therefore better.
So though I didn’t like my dish at Hallo Berlin much—maybe I’d have been better off with some of that wurst—I still respect my heritage and do not begrudge the country of Germany and its heavy food at large. To show there’s no hard feelings, here’s a file photo from January 2002 of me enjoying a pig ride in Köln. Where does the time go?
Hallo Berlin
- 626 10th Ave.
- (212) 977-1944
- Meal 30 of 52: roulade with red cabbage, string beans and cucumber salad, plus bread and butter, and soup ($18) and a stein of Köstritzer ($7).