Pub food in central Berlin

Fresh into Berlin, and we want Berlin food! We head to a pub near downtown that has a good reputation and settle in for our meal.

Our first dish is a pickled egg. It takes so much work! Kevika essentially makes a deviled egg at the table, scooping out the yolk, adding mustard, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and Maggi sauce. It was quite a production to behold, and she kept her cool the whole time. The egg, as a result, was pretty delicious.

Another appetizer was bread covered with lard. This had a great German name that I can't fully recall but that goes something like "Schmaltzsprede." It was interesting, like a very strange butter had coated the bread and would then coat our mouths.

Of the mains we shared, the first was meatball with potato salad. The meat was flavorful and the potato salad pretty good, with not too much mayo. But the best part of this dish was the little red salsa in the piece of endive. It was spicy, especially so by my understanding of German spiciness levels. Really added to the dish.

A second dish was wiener schnitzel with potatoes and chanterelles. The schnitzel here was pretty tasty, pounded thin and spritzed with a dash of lemon. The chanterelles were also very nice - these mushrooms are everywhere here, which is fantastic! The potatoes were very potatoey, with little flavor beyond mush.

The final dish was pork escalope with mushrooms and potato pancakes. The pork was, alas, just ok. The breading seemed to slip off the pork and the meat itself was a little bland. The mushrooms were tasty, though, and who ever went wrong with potato pancakes?

To wrap it up, a slice of apple strudel was what we needed. This version was actually odd, with the wrapper being a kind of pastry that was new to me, and unfortunately a little gummy. But the apples inside weren't too bad.

We went looking for pub food and we got...pub food. Not the best meal in the history of the world, but it was decent enough.