One of the strangest most globalized meals I have ever had.
Salt and Pepper claims to be an Indian Mexican place.
It is by no stretch of the imagination Indian Mexican fusion.
There is no attempt to combine Indian food ideas and Mexican food ideas to come up with anything unusual or distinctive.
It is a restaurant that serves Indian items (75% of the menu) and Mexican items (20% of the menu).
They also have burgers and steaks if you insist.
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I had Texas-style chips and dip and Tandoori chicken in a cashew sauce.
The Tandoori chicken was served with an English salad with salad cream.
The salad was NOT a German dish. Salad cream is strictly British.
My beverage was mango schnapps.
Mango schnapps IS German.
So I was having Mexican and Indian and English and German all at the same time.
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Tangent - Schnapps
Schnapps have virtually disappeared from Berlin bars and restaurants - except for a very small number of dedicated German food places.
I had come to Berlin hoping to drink all different sorts of schnapps - a dream which simply isn't going to happen.
No-German is a Berlin thing.
Much of the rest of Germany has German food and German beverages.
One food writer hypothesizes Berlin's massive commitment to international food is the result of Berlin being an international city controlled by four foreign powers for over forty years. There was American Berlin and English Berlin and French Berlin and Russian Berlin.
Some of this is the generalized globalization that is affecting all of the capital cities of Europe.
I have had Francophiles complain that Paris is now the least French city in France.
For whatever reason, German food and beverage are now hard to find in Berlin.
Note that the scarcity does NOT apply to German beer.
Berliners may be international - but they are NOT stupid.
That said,
The irony of having my one mango schnapps in an Indian restaurant was not lost on me.
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How was the food?
Interesting and savable.
Salt and Pepper uses vast amounts of standard industrialized ingredients.
German Supermarkets sell mass produced Mexican food items to German customers.
Indian supermarkets have vast numbers of bottled sauces.
There is a large Indian supermarket one street over from Salt and Pepper that sells much the same food that Indian supermarkets sell in the United States.
There are also the wholesalers who provide groceries to the enormous number of Indian restaurants in Berlin.
Supermarket sauces made the meal.
My tortilla chips for the chips and dip were German Engineered.
There were virtually identical circles of masa chips - each of the same circumference and thickness.
They looked just like Pringles.
They didn't taste like much.
They were served with mild salsa straight out of the bottle.
I could have bought that salsa at the supermarket near my apartment.
There was also bland guacamole - also supermarket, and a sour cream that was tame even by German standards.
Entertainingly, the sauces were not served in Mexican style sauce dishes but were served in the microscopic sauce dishes used in Indian restaurants for the accompaniments to pappadams.
Strangely, the microscopic servings of dips actually worked.
The bowls were so small you couldn't get very much salsa on your chip unless you broke the chip in half.
The micro-doses of sauce on half chips surprisingly did the job. The sauces in the pappadam bowls were okay and lasted the whole meal.
The tandoori chicken with cashew sauce was a major bore.
The kitchen, probably fully aware of its sins, also provided a tamarind sauce, a raita and a green chili sauce.
The bottled tamarind sauce and raita were passable for what they were.
The green chili sauce was an absolute world beater.
The green chili sauce - which could have been pure pulverized green chilies with just enough liquid to make them a sauce - was also major fire coming out of the ears material.
It threw all sorts of life into the cashew chicken.
It also made the guacamole, the sour cream, the mild salsa, the raita and the tamarind sauce absolute necessities.
I went through every molecule of all five sauces and still had half of the green chili sauce left in my bowl.
And I went through all of my rice.
And I went through a salty lassi.
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Frankly however, this was all good eating,
But, a repeat visit is not in the cards
But I had a good time and had an entertaining meal.
Should you make Salt and Pepper one of your destination eating locations on your next visit to Berlin?
Probably not.
But a lot of people do eat here.
And if you ended up here because the people you were with insisted this is where they wanted to go
You could find something that would be okay.
Like maybe a glass of mango schnapps. read more
