If you managed to avoid the curry dogs, where did you go for a
nice meal?
I went to one of the best restaurants I have ever been to in my
life: Restaurant Vau. It's like one of those meals that people have
in
Paris that they talk about their whole life, where it's all the
different little courses of a half partridge with grapefruit and
so on, and each thing is served with the perfect wine to go with
it. We decided to do the tasting thing, so we were there for hours.
It is in the central part of
Berlin. Vau is beautiful, with almost
a Viennese touch but still really contemporary design on the inside
with this wood paneling. You wouldn't have found that in
Germany 10
years ago. It was the best meal I've had in 100 years. I also went
to a place I really liked called Lubitsch, like the
director. It's
in Charlottenburg. It's German
food with a Euro slant to it. Almost
like a German version of a French brasserie.
Did you revisit any of the restaurants your mother
took you to?
When I was a kid, my mom took me to beer gardens. But, you know,
beer gardens are only good in the summertime. I found a great
lunchy coffee bar called Einstein Café that was really good and had
music.
Did you have time to check out any of the clubs?
I'm not a nightlife person, but a couple of nights we went looking
for fun. We couldn't find any because we were always off so late.
We'd get off work at three in the morning, and we'd go driving
around the city, you know, driving around, saying "What about this
place, and what about that place?" Nobody would be in there. I was
thinking, Maybe I'll see Hedwig. Did you ever see that movie,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch? I was thinking about Hedwig. I was
thinking that I wanted to go see the place where it is like the
movie, with lots of people wearing berets and smoking cigarettes
and then, like, drag queens. You know, I was looking for that. I
think it does exist. But I went home and went to bed, or watched
DVDs. We did find two good places, Maria am Ostbahnhof and Sage
Club.