Hungry in Berlin

We’d been hearing about it for years: a huge Vietnamese market somewhere in the deep east, where the freshest herbs and vegetables you could want for your Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese cooking were available, and the space was dotted with lunch-stands serving many kinds of phô, the famous beef-and-noodle soup. The question was, where was it?

Which was exactly the question we found ourselves asking yesterday noon, as four of us, in two cars, in the wilds on the border of Lichtenberg and Marzahn, pored over cell-phones and GPS units, looking for this place one of us had scrupulously researched on the Internet. As it turned out, we’d found where it had been, but where was it now?

Eventually, an answer bubbled out of cyberspace: the word Herzbergstrasse appeared on a cell-phone, and buttons were pressed, speculation was tossed around, and eventually our caravan made its chaotic way towards the Dong Xuan Center, another planet in the Berlin cosmos.

The complex is part of a much larger one, an old industrial space with some crumbling brick buildings, a newish warehouse space labelled China Schue Center, into whose parking-lot we piled, lured by the ornate gate framing the entrance, a gigantic blue building, which serves as a receiving area for containers on trucks, which have picked them up in Hamburg or Rotterdam, and, our destination, the three long, thin halls with the wholesale/retail businesses.

For the most part, what’s on sale at Dong Xuan is the same crap you find in the ubiquitous Vietnamese-owned crap stores which litter Berlin, particularly in the east: ultra-cheap, Chinese-made clothing, off-brand electronics, and “gift items” of spectacular uselessness. If you’ve ever wondered where all those dumb waving cats come from, you’ve found the source. Those off-brand sneakers outgassing in the hot sun? Here they are, in colorful profusion. Those horrible mock-aquariums with plastic fish that light up? Every model and variety under the sun.

But, of course, we weren’t there for that. We were there because we were hungry. And, as we quickly noticed, inbetween the clothing stores, the nail salons (there are dozens of these, as well as many wholesale cosmetics businesses), and the crap-merchants, there was food, both on the hoof and raw.

But we were too hungry, as it turned out. Not having scoped this gigantic property out properly, we walked into the first place we found, and it wasn’t a lot of fun. The menu was all in Vietnamese, although there were a few pages in German at the back. Unless Vietnamese is a far less concise language that I’d thought, it looked like there were double the menu listings in Vietnamese than in German. Nonetheless, we had a pretty good selection to choose from, or so it appeared.

But then there was the waitress to cope with. I ordered some odd concoction which appeared to be “Eisbein” (which, as I know from experience, probably means something else in East Asian terms) with noodles. No. “You won’t like it.” I will, I countered. I’m from California, and I eat Vietnamese food all the time. (Okay, I fudged on the geography. Don’t tell her.) “No. That has stink-sauce.” Stink-sauce? “Yes, made from fish. Fish sauce. Anyway, only old Vietnamese people eat that.” Well, I’ve certainly cooked with fish sauce, and rather like it, but she was adamant. Perhaps one reason the Vietnamese here have integrated as well as they have is that they’ve learned to tell you that you can’t do what you want and can’t have what you want. It’s an old Berlin tradition.

So we ordered. Two of us ordered bun, rice noodles with pork, and what was advertised as sausage, but turned out to be a form of Vietnamese bologna cut into thin strips. The “green table,” or selection of herbs and vegetables served with a Vietnamese dish, had already been integrated into the soup. To say it was bland was an understatement. A large medicine jar of vinegar with hunks of garlic and red chile floating in it was pressed into service, and made it palatable.

Another of us ordered phô, which didn’t look much different.

The wisest among us ordered beef with noodles, and got something with a little more flavor, but still, in my estimation, not very interesting:

Each of these dishes cost €6, which was awfully high. A small, but yummy, Vietnamese iced coffee (not included on the German menu) was €3.

This restaurant was in the middle of Hall 1, and as we walked out to inspect the rest of that hall and the other two, we realized we’d very likely made a mistake. At the end of each of the halls there are much larger restaurants, with elaborate karaoke screens and stages, and a bit of poking around found charcoal grills standing outdoors ready for use, large bowls of soup — much larger than we’d gotten — on tables, and, most tellingly, many, many more customers than we’d found in the place we’d selected. Walking by the open window of one of the restaurants’ kitchens, the odor of star anise in broth drifted out the window, causing sighs of regret all round.

But, unfortunately, we were full, and so we trod on, looking for the groceries. Which we found. First, there was an Indian grocery shop, small but excellent, in Hall 1. Here, I picked up some very inexpensive okra, which will be part of a meal in the next 24 hours, I’m sure. I have no idea why the Thai/Vietnamese shops sell okra in groups of six or eight pods, all shrink-wrapped to a small tray, for three euros when for two I got a pound of the stuff from the friendly, joking, English-speaking Indians. (One of our party also got snookered into buying more bananas — albeit tree-ripened, fantastic-smelling ones — than he could possibly eat by one of the guys here. Beware!)

The real deal, though, is the Vietnamese markets, one of which, in Hall 3, is immense and very, very thorough. If you want goat-meat, they have it, and it looked excellent. Many, many herbs and vegetables lie in boxes, shrouded by damp towels or newspaper. Need a wok? There are a dozen different sizes and forms. Loads of different kinds of rice, shelf after shelf of dried noodles, and canned goods of every sort. And don’t even get me going on the frozen popsicles, which even come in durian flavor. (And yes, for the first time I got to smell durian, which was hiding in one of the shops unseen, but very much not unsmelled. I can see why people don’t want it in their houses, but I do admit to being curious about what it tastes like. You can, of course, get it frozen whole.)

Being rather unfulfilled spiritually and gastronomically, in one of these grocery depots, we noticed a number of snack foods, including bao, the Chinese steamed, yeasted dumpling, which is usually filled with something, in this case ground pork and a quarter of a hard-boiled egg. It was there that I had an experience I was certain I was going to have one day. The friendly guy behind the counter started chatting with me while my bao was in the microwave, and asked me where I was from, since he knew I wasn’t German. I told him I was American, and another guy, about 50, who was hanging around the counter spat out “Amerikaner. Amerikaner!” He turned his back. The proprietor pretended he hadn’t noticed, and the awkward moment was saved by the ping of the microwave. But it was disquieting.

Our takeaway (other than okra, bananas, popsicles, and some real good-looking bok choi) was as follows: weekdays are absolutely the best time to visit Dong Xuan. Weekends, it turns into the Vietnamese cultural center and shopping mall it also functions as, the nail salons fill up, families shop for clothing, and people clog the restaurants eating down-home food and load up on it in the grocery depots. We are definitely headed back to try one or two of the other restaurants, but desperately wish we knew a Vietnamese-speaker, both to help with the menus and to shout down the wait personnel.

Dong Xuan Center, Herzfeldstr. 128-139, Berlin-Lichtenberg. Tram M8, M 21.

Tags: asian, market, restaurant, shopping, vegetable

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