Food and beer this summer

I did a fair amount of traveling over the summer and I'd like to briefly recount the highlights and lowlights of that which I ate.
Lets starts with a low. Berlin, a vegan restaurant called Cafe V -- after spending the entire day wandering through the city seeing the sites I was in dire need for a nice relaxing meal. I found my way to a nice restaurant my cousin had mentioned (a friend had told her about the place). I found a seat outside of the place and considered my menu options. It was nice to have so many options, especially after having been in Prague where my options were generally limited to one or two things on the menu. I settled on a tofu curry with zucchini. Despite sitting outdoors, I could not escape the annoying cigarette smoke which wafted towards me from the other few patrons outside. There were probably three people sitting outside, yet at any given moment at least one was smoking --- makes you wonder how they had time to eat. Besides gripping about the smoke, my other distraction while waiting for the food was the occurrences going on a little further up the block. I was convinced that there was going to be a mafia hit in the apartment building next to the restaurant. These really smarmy looking fellows kept going in and out, and going to the trunk and looking at some envelops and inside a duffel bag... But, thankfully, no hit occurred (to my knowledge).
These mob fantasies were abruptly interrupted by the arrival of my food. The dish looked very nice -- and the waitress also brought me a free order of garlic bread. Great! Well, maybe not. Upon tasting the sauce and tofu I immediately realized why I was compted the garlic bread. The tofu tasted, well, like tofu --- plain, unmarinaded, uncooked tofu. As far as the curry sauce, there are many varieties which exists but I'm pretty sure that turmeric and water does not constitute a curry sauce. The sauce was so thin and flavorless. The only redeeming elements of the meal were the zucchini and the garlic bread. But then again those are probably two of the easiest things to not mess up. As I was alone at the restaurant and had noone to gripe about it to I had a running inner monologue in which I berated the food and came up with craftier and craftier ways to insult the quality of the restaurant. Someone should really tell them that they suck --- but my German is... well... as bad as their tofu.

I had another bad food experience in Berlin, but enough bad. Despite not being able to eat much of the local fare, I had a pretty good culinary experience during my visit to Prague. First of all, I was happily surprised to discover that Prague has wild pears, apples, plums and even some figs.
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The wild fruit was not as impressive as in Berkeley where the plums are super ripe and incredibly ample, as are the figs. A moment more of bashing Berlin with respect to fruit -- the last day I was there I decided to go to Potsdam which is outside of the city and where there are gigantic palaces and parks. One of the palaces had a terraced garden leading up to it. At each level of the garden were about 20 recessed sections of the terrace wall and in each of these recessions were two fig trees. In totally there were roughly 200 fig trees. Between these recessions, the wall was covered with grapes. I was hungry for a fig was had some time to spare so I decided to look at each tree until I found a fig. To keep my mouth busy during the hunt I made sure to have a constant supply of grapes (nice and sour ones). After roughly an hour of looking I had inspected every fig tree and come to the conclusion that there were no rip figs in Berlin. Such a shame considering that in Prague I had eaten some wonderfully rip figs at the Wallenstein gardens.

Beyond found fruit, Prague offered some wonderful beer and also some pretty yummy preserved fish and cabbage. The beer was super cheap and I made sure to have at least one with lunch and one in the evening every day. Half a litter of the beer cost about $1.50. Not too bad. It was always cheaper to get beer with a meal than water (which is not free there and always comes in bottles owing to old pipes which evidently make the water undrinkable). I've been lucky enough to try a lot of good beer (most recent before Prague was in San Francisco which has excellent local brewing). I thought that the Czech beer was very refreshing and smooth and drinkable, but not as interesting as Belgian or even some local American beers.

Since most of the restaurant food was patently unkosher I didn't eat out much but rather went to the super market and purchased the following wonderfully cheap and tasty items: Crusty brown rolls, Edam cheese, preserved fish (salmon or trout or sardines), arugula, sweet red pepper, watermelon and chocolate. The deals were great for these items -- more than enough smoked fish to fill me up cost something like 40 cents, and the watermelon was cheap as cheap can be. I ended up eating these items for most of my days and enjoying every bite of it.

I did have a few nice restaurant visits. At one place I bought herring (for maybe $2's) and was brought a plate with a fist sized rolled up chunk of herring with shredded onion and three bread dumplings. The herring was really fishing and really good and I definitely smelled like fish for the rest of the day. Another nice "meal" I had was a plate full of red and white cabbage which had been dressed with a nice acidic dressing. I think I surprised the waiter by getting this side dish and then eating it all myself (other groups split one of these plates among many people).

There was a kosher restaurant which I did go to one night called King Solomon's. For, by Czech standard, a fortune ($30) I had a nice three course meal there which started with a slightly nicer version of hotdog soup (it had some kosher sausage and a tomato base) and focused on a braised turkey chunk served on a tomato, zucchini, onion ratatouille. The turkey was probably the best preparation of turkey I've ever had. It was incredibly flavorful and juicy and went really well with the ratatouille.

To sum up ---
Berlin = crappy food;
Prague = limited but good food;
Fish = ate too much;
Fruit = always makes a place better in my book;
Beer = good, especially when cheap.