Chocolate, falafel and beer - a recipe for good cheer!

On the corner of Mohenstrasse and Charlottenstrasse, close to Gendarmenmarkt and the Stadtmitte U-bahn station, you'll find a dream shop that sells only chocolate...any kind of chocolate in any form. It even had a Brandenburg Gate made of chocolate. Above the shop there's a restaurant reached by a rather complicated lift (which makes the experience even more 'Charlie and the Chocolate factory') and guess what they serve? Chocolate!

I had drinking chocolate with chilli - something I've always wanted to try. It was good. I bought a bag of drink-mix and I'll try putting some chilli in it next time I make up drinks.

A good veggie luch/snack place we found the same day is Baharat Falafel. The chief is Iraqi and we were served by a Lebanese bloke. The menu is basic, consisting of falafel with a choice of the usual accompaniments - salad, chilli sauce, fried egg-plant and cauliflower, humus, mutabal, tabuleh, etc. It's all very authentic. The whole experience took me right back to my days as a teacher in the Middle East when my students and I would dodge class en-masse and go down to the Falafal shop to 'practise English conversation'. The restaurant is located on Winterfeldstrasse 37, very close to KeDeWe department store.

For more information on eating in Berlin see http://berlineating.blogspot.com/ for loads of restaurant reviews. There aren't a lot of pure veg restaurants listed but there are a couple I didn't have a chance to check out and the reviews are generally in-depth and well balanced.  

I've just posted what I expect will be the last page of photos from Berlin. Three is enough, I think. Anyways, next stop is Exeter, UK,  a historic city surrounded by the beautiful Devon countryside - loadsa cracking coastal walks nearby and even a town called Beer. Imagine that.

Talking of beer, I'm not a regular beer drinker, but I felt I had to make an exception in Berlin, just to see if the beer is as good as people say it is (though I expect the good folk of Munchen don't say Berlin beer is so good...) After sampling almost every kind of beer I could find, I have to conclude that all the fuss about German beer is totally justified. It's top-notch stuff.

If I do go for beer, I usually prefer British real ales. The best used to always be English but Scotland also produces quite a few tasty beers nowadays. I usually tend to avoid lager or pilsner type beers because they are usually, in my opinion, crap. Inferior, insipid products lacking in character that tend to give me a rotten hangover. Berlin beer is different...

The choice of different types of beer in Berlin was amazing and there were clear differences in taste not only between different types, but also between the same types of beer from different breweries. I liked the pils beers for easy drinking, but the unfiltered wheat beers were all absolutely delicious and some of the very dark beers are good too (though a few were too sweet for me).

And the best thing of all about drinking German beer? The best thing is, and this is true - I tested it very thoroughly - there's NAE HANGOVER in the morning!