Christina Ng celebrates the delicious diversity of Berlin’s Chinese restaurants…
The diversity of Chinese food is as vast as China itself, and Berlin is lucky enough to be able to offer a variety of Chinese-related cuisines that go well beyond even mainland China; which is curious since the German capital doesn’t even have its own officially designated Chinatown. Whereas London’s present Chinatown was established in Leicester Square in the 1970s and Paris’ Chinatown was created in the 13th arrondissement around the same time, Berlin has made up for a lack of specificity with pockets of Chinese restaurants scattered all over the city—albeit with a notable cluster in West Berlin’s Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district.
On the Kantstraße in Charlottenburg, a string of Chinese restaurants vie for attention. The section of the street between Savignyplatz and Wilmersdorfer Straße is also referred to as Canton Road, alluding to the Guangdong province in China, which explains why a few of the older restaurants here, like Aroma and Good Friends, offer Cantonese food, Despite being a tad too generous with salt and grease in some cases, both of these long-established restaurants continue to be a hit with both German and Asian diners.
Good Friends’ glistening roast duck and pork with crackling served with a sweet, sticky sauce are still a highlight, whereas Aroma, just a few doors down the road, can be depended upon to serve typical dim sum items of Lo Bak Go (deep fried turnip cakes), Char Siew Bao (roast pork buns) and quaint morsels of Siew Mai (steamed pork dumplings) if anyone has a craving for Chinese-style tapas. These places are hardly a secret though: at weekends, it’s not uncommon to spot boisterous tour groups through the large windows, happily sharing and devouring a variety of dishes at big round tables.
A bit more footwork down the same street will bring you to the much smaller and slightly more cultish Lon Men Noodle House, which some of Berlin’s Taiwanese Chinese residents are happy to form a nice little queue for. The place is reminiscent of the ubiquitous family-owned establishments you can find along Taipei’s bustling streets, and serves up similar food—a blend of sweet and savoury flavours that reveal influences from the Chinese Fujian province and Japan (of which Taiwan was a former colony), with street snacks like Gua Bao (Taiwanese pork belly buns), and what the Taiwanese would call family-style home cooked food: the piping hot beef noodles are especially fulfilling if you pair them with a plate of mouth-numbing chilli wontons on the side.
