Hi there. It’s been a minute since I published one of these. There just hasn’t been a whole lot of space in my brain for the last couple of weeks. There are a lot of things that have left me, and maybe you, feeling depleted. You can read about some of them here or here, because I am not going to write about them here. Instead, I would like to write about hummus.
Hummus is one of those dishes that spans cultures across the Levantine region. Like jollof rice, ragú, and pavlova, its exact origins are heavily contested and everyone claims to have the best version of it. Since Berlin is home to sizeable Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Turkish, and Israeli communities, it also happens to be awash in all sorts of regional variations of chickpea purée. Several years ago, Anne Thomas wrote this wonderful piece about the (mostly) friendly rivalry and standout restaurants like Azzam on Sonnenallee.
One of the most promising developments to Berlin’s dining scene in recent years has been the explosion of Israeli restaurants, almost all of them launched by young, ambitious expats looking to make a home in the Hauptstadt. Back in 2016, I had the privilege to speak with Oz Ben David, who cofounded Kanaan with Jalil Dabit, a Palestinian chef whose family has been in the hummus business for generations. They’ve moved to slightly fancier digs in Prenzlauer-Berg since then, but the hummus is still the same velvety, tahini emulsion I want to slather on everything. Plenty of others have joined, including Shani Ahiel, who opened Yafo (which is, sadly, in the process of moving to a new location) and its younger, more upscale sibling Shishi.
It is impossible to speak of the generation that has chosen to return without remembering the one that was lost. During the Weimar Republic, Berlin’s thriving Jewish population numbered more than 160,000 and included some of the most prominent intellectuals and literati of the era. Very little of that world survives, although reminders of the people who built it are woven into the physical fabric of the city in the form of Stolpersteine, thousands upon thousands of brass plaques with the names of those who were taken in front of the homes where they once lived. There are dozens around my neighborhood.
I think back to Deborah Cole’s piece on how Berlin is a city in which “history never lets you be” often. As Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said earlier this year in his speech commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Germany is a country that can only be loved “with a broken heart.” And I think about the optimism and courage of those who have exercised their right to return, who have chosen to immigrate from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem in order to build a future here.
When Guy Balassiano, who hails from Haifa, moved here, he took a number of his mother and grandmother’s recipes with him. He set up Café Mugrabi, a low-key restaurant on the edge of Görlitzer Park that I’ve found myself returning to more than almost anywhere. Part of this has to do with the terrace, which epitomizes what outdoor dining ought to be. Another part has to do with the hummus sabich, with plush eggplant, a runny egg, and a squiggle of zhoug like a vivid green punctuation mark. The roasted cauliflower, which comes with tahini, pomegranate, walnuts, and other good things, belongs on every table.
More than anything, though, Café Mugrabi embodies the kind of restaurant where I actually want to hang out Sunday long. As much as I hate to call it a brunch spot, it’s ideal for that long, lazy meal between mealtimes. Brunch as a concept has become a sort of grotesque parody of itself that plays out with oppressive sameness around the world. Overpriced eggs Benedict, aggressive servers, and tables of influencers getting plastered on mimosas have become near-universal clichés. Often, this generic brand of globalism comes at the cost of whatever was there beforehand—I never forgot when one of the few surviving clusters of street food vendors in Bangkok’s Thonglor neighborhood was displaced. Around the same time, an Australian brunch spot with a whole lot of exposed concrete and ferns cropped up. The price of an avocado toast exceeded Thailand’s daily minimum wage.
Café Mugrabi is the diametric opposite. It’s a neighborhood restaurant that actually serves its neighborhood. Everything on the menu is delicious, generous in size, and often costs less than €10. The coffee is very good and no one will give you side-eye for asking for Leitungswasser (tap water). The service is slow and chaotic—tables are first-come, first-serve, and since there’s no line, the crowd waiting to pounce on weekends is considerable. Somehow though, nothing feels rushed and no one is stressed. I’ve spent hours at a table with friends, gradually ordering more dishes as additional guests joined. And a few weeks ago, when I swung by alone with a book at peak hours, a German couple I’d never met invited me to share their table. It’s just that kind of place.
What I’m Reading
Jessica Bateman, who is a friend and awesome journalist, has been doing some incredible longreads for the BBC. I contributed a tiny bit of reporting for The return of Europe’s largest beasts, a look into the tricky, divisive politics of reintroducing bison, wolves, and other charismatic megafauna to Europe. The German medical students who want to learn about abortion is a deep-dive into why access to safe abortions is still inaccessible in more conservative parts of the country. Finally, 'Their ideas had no place here': how Crete kicked out Golden Dawn (The Guardian) is not new, but is it incredibly relevant given the rise of armed fascist right-wing groups around the globe.
“In its early evolutionary history, the octopus gave up its protective, molluscan shell in order to embrace a life of unboundaried potential. But the cost was an increased vulnerability to toothy and bony predators. An animal with a soft body and no shell cannot expect to live long, and so harmful mutations that take effect only once it has been alive for a couple of years will soon spread through the population. The result is a life that is experientially rich but conspicuously brief.” Amia Srinivasan’s piece The Sucker, The Sucker! (The London Review of Books) resurfaced on Twitter recently and it is a weird, heartbreaking examination at the aliens living within our oceans.
Masha Gessen envisions what a more equitable metropolis would do in Mourning the Autumn in New York City That Could Have Been. “Hannah Arendt once wrote that all that separates us from the ever-real threat of totalitarianism is ‘the great capacity of men to start something new.’ Little is new in this city now.”
I don’t know about you, but all that ambitious quarantine cooking I was doing has really gone downhill. A few months ago, grocery shopping at the Turkish Market and Marheineke Markthalle was often both my only source of human contact and a high point in the day. So I roasted adorable, perfect French chickens. I seared monkfish and plated it on top of chanterelles swimming in creme fraiche. I took a lot of pictures for social media, not because anyone really cared, but because it felt like some sort of concrete documentation of an amorphous time. Over the last week, dinners have consisted of whatever will make the fewest dishes. Several have involved eating almond butter out of its plastic container with a spoon. The Dinners That Didn’t Make Instagram (TASTE), compiled by Anna Hezel, is a reassuring reminder that other self-declared “Food People” have also officially reached the “fuck it” stage.