Posted by Seth on December 24, 2009 under Dining, Trip Reports | 
It took me far too long in life to make a trip to Munich. I don’t know particularly why it was so delayed, but the planning just never worked out right. I had a layover in the train station there about 10 years ago but I never really went outside – big mistake – and so when the opportunity came up recently to add a weekend in Munich on to a scheduled trip to Germany I jumped at the opportunity.
I visited in mid-November so it was most definitely the off-peak season in town. Still, there was plenty going on, both during the day and at night. It was more than enough to keep me busy and entertained. Wandering the quiet pedestrian mall area of town was quite enjoyable, even in a light drizzle. Plus I managed to stumble into some phenomenal dining and drinking opportunities along the way.
After a rather unfortunate episode at the bar of the otherwise lovely Sofitel in the heart of the city a group of us made our way to a new bar/club in town, Eight Seasons. The night manager of the hotel was kind enough to make a call and get six of us on the list to enter which was a good thing as the place had the velvet rope and clipboard crew similar to many clubs in New York City. The scene inside was pretty much what I expected from a club with such an entrance policy but we still had a great time. I’m not entirely sure what we paid for the bottle of Bombay Sapphire that was consumed but it was delicious so I wasn’t all that worried about it. And we finished the night with a very late-night and very intoxicated amble/stumble to a street food vendor outside the train station and also to Burger King. Not the most authentic cuisine, but the strawberry shake was pretty good and the photos are pretty incriminating.
At the Bräuhaus
The following night was a dinner with the group at the Augustiner Bräuhaus, just a couple blocks from the train station. The restaurant is associated with the brewery and it isn’t completely clear which part they take more pride in, though I’m pretty sure it is the beer. Still, the food is delicious. With a group as large as ours – about 30 folks – the only reasonable option is to go with the sampler platters that they offer up. The appetizer course has various meats, cheese and spreads along with some breads and crackers. The main course was four or five different meats and some ridiculously delicious potato dumplings. Plus, the beer comes in liter-large glass mugs and it is phenomenal. After four mugs of beer I didn’t even really think it was that bad an idea to do jager shots. I know that I was wrong in that analysis and I did protest the concept a bit at the time, but ultimately the beer, exhaustion and a bit of peer pressure did me in. Jager shots for everyone. MANY of them!
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| Appetizer platter at Augustiner |
I probably shouldn’t have done the Jager shots! |
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| Large quantities of delicious beer |
We learned later that night that one of the group picked up the wrong jacket when leaving the restaurant. This was discovered when he reached into the pocket of the jacket he was wearing and pulled out someone else’s passport. Whoopsie. The hotel concierge was quite helpful in resolving that situation (which is to say that I dumped it on him and assume it was eventually resolved) but it also meant that we needed to go back to the restaurant the following day to find the correct jacket. I’m very, very glad we did.
It was a Sunday afternoon and they set up a TV in the main dining room for the locals to come in and watch the local Bundesliga team play, and also to enjoy a few beers. I discovered the German version of the morning after drink – a lighter beer cut with lemonade, quite tasty and refreshing – and I got to explore the rest of the menu. Oliver was there to translate for me which helped out immensely as the English version of their menu has only a small portion of the full selection. In discussion with the waiter and after much internal debate I settled on the Braumeister Schnitzel. It is the heartiest version of schnitzel on the menu, meant for the hard working, blue-collar brew master. And it was awesome.
Piled high with bacon and potatoes, it was just the right thing to cut through the alcohol still in my system and aid the hangover recovery. We also had a dessert of some sort that was pretty much fried dough topped with powdered sugar and some fruit preserves. The fried dough thing is a dessert in pretty much every culture around the world and the German version did not disappoint. Sugary sweet doughy goodness. Yum.
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| Braumeister Schnitzel and a morning-after beer |
Fried doughy goodness |
Seafood in Munich
My trip to Germany started with about 225 other folks chartering a 757 and flying around Europe on tours, so there were a decent number of folks I knew in Germany that weekend. Still, I didn’t really expect to randomly run in to two of them as I was touring about on the streets of Munich. Boy am I glad I did. They had made reservations for dinner that night and invited me to join them at Austernkeller. Austernkeller is a seafood restaurant in the French style which isn’t really what I would think of when choosing a dinner option in Munich. Fortunately these guys were making the decisions for that night, however, and it was a wonderful meal.
As is often the case the appetizers were better than the main course dishes but it was all pretty delicious. The oysters – wild Aussies – were the highlight of the meal for me, followed by the scallops and the fish. I thought the seared tuna was overcooked, but i like my tuna raw so maybe I’m not the best judge there. Still, the place has been around for over 30 years and there’s a reason for that. The food is top notch.
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| Some of the many delicious dishes at Austernkeller |
One other thing that I love eating is kebabs from the shops near train stations. No, there is no good reason for this, but I generally find that the food is pretty good and pretty cheap. That’s not so bad. On the way out to the airport for my flight to Los Angeles I stopped in at one of the many shops available and had my donner kebab gyro. Yum!
Posted by Seth on December 12, 2009 under Dining, Trip Reports |
The fickle upgrade gods are very much exactly that. Fickle. And Continental makes it easy to wring one’s hands over the upgrades. Their website makes it easy for passengers to monitor their position on the upgrade waitlist, as well as the number of open seats in the front cabin. So around 10am today I logged in to check. The ultimate tease presented itself. I was number one on the list but the front cabin was booked full. Bummer.
An hour prior to the flight I was happily ensconced in the Presidents Club, having a pre-flight beverage and I checked again. Still number one on the list but now only 19 seats up front booked. Things are getting interesting. With only one seat open up front it seemed somewhat a waste of time to add my wife to the list as a companion upgrade but, you’ve gotta be in it to win it so what the heck. Besides, without that upgrade I’m still sitting in the back.
A quick trip up to the counter and she’s on the list. Except she’s not. When I got back over to the bar where I left my laptop and refresh the list she still wasn’t there. Finish the drink – priorities – and then back to the counter. We go through the process again and a quick refresh confirms that she is now there, sitting pretty at number three and still one seat available.
Fast forward to the gate at boarding time. One last check before taking our exit row seats. Uh-oh. The upgrade gods are toying with us. That last seat is now taken by someone else and we’ve dropped to numbers two and four on the list. Such is life. For the price I paid I can’t really complain about the exit row. Besides, I‘ve got a pretty good sub in my bag that I brought for dinner. So we board and settle in to our seats.
Just to pain myself I refresh the list to see where we’re going to end up on the list. Sacre Bleu! Only 18 seats booked up front now, and I’m still number two on the list. Could there be such a miracle? And then, 10 minutes prior to departure, four seats available and we’re in spots 2 and 4. We’re in the money assuming the race ends as shown at that point. And then, with 5 minutes to go, the announcement is made that the forward boarding door is closed. One more refresh and the top three are cleared, leaving one empty and me (in the form of my wife’s companion upgrade) in that last spot.
Awww…screw it. I know I’m supposed to be in that seat. It is time for drastic measures. I make the self-upgrade happen. I explain the situation to the head flight attendant – that I’m next on the list – and he understands and acknowledges that he was going to find that next person so I can go ahead and sit down. Even better, the two seats they assigned to us are actually together. No need to bother the other passengers with trying to move around at the last minute.
And that brings us to the potato strings on the lasagna. We were in the last row of first so no choice in our dinner: lasagna with red pepper soup and a salad. It actually was all decent, but they had crispy potato stings on the lasagna. I just don’t get that one at all. Still, dinner was pretty good and the Argentinean red wine that Continental is serving this month is actually pretty decent. Of course I’m driving on arrival so I can’t fully take advantage of the situation but such is life.
And on a day of crazy winds in Newark our flight is on-time into Ft. Lauderdale. I love it when a plan comes together.
Oh, and to the guy in 15C who the deadheading flight attendant told you’d probably get the upgrade but who was behind my wife (i.e. me) on the list, sorry for getting your hopes up and then squashing them when it didn’t happen. Oops.
Posted by Seth on October 26, 2009 under Dining, Trip Reports |
Coming off another 48 hours in Waikiki I’m finally getting to the point where I don’t hate the place. When the sales come up the flights are a great price for the number of miles earned so it is really hard to resist them. But I’m generally not all that happy in Waikiki. The beach is fake and not particularly soft. Plus it is incredibly crowded and loud. The shopping is the same as many places on the mainland (though more expensive) and the food is mostly chain restaurants that are overpriced and not particularly good. The ones that aren’t chains are just overpriced for the most part. It certainly takes away from my enjoyment of a quick weekend away.
But since I’ve actually done this trip a couple times now I’m starting to find some of the less touristy dining choices. Delicious food at reasonable prices and all right in Waikiki Beach (or very close by). All of them are located towards the Diamond Head end of the beach, a bit out of the fray but not too much so.
- Me B-B-Q
808.926.9717
Great Korean BBQ shop with breakfast, lunch and dinner every day but Sunday. Meat, rice and a side range from $6-12 and is way more than enough food even after a long day of surfing or diving.
- Morio’s Sushi
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| Mmmm…brains. Enjoying sweet shrimp at Morio’s. |
808.741.5121
Housed in a natural foods market, at night Morio’s transforms into one of the better sushi shops along Waikiki Beach. Morio works the sushi bar himself while a couple of waiters scurry around the small kitchen to help serve guests at the 5 tables on the adjoining patio. There are only about 8 seats at the counter and getting one can be tough – especially on a Saturday night. Morio’s regulars are loyal and keep coming back, with good reason. When in doubt, ask Morio for a recommendation. It is sure to please.
Morio’s is also a BYOB shop and there are at least three convenience stores on the block. More than one guest headed back out mid-meal for more as the drinks kept flowing. Some of the regulars were even sharing their stash with the staff. Watching a guy move his hands that quickly with such sharp knives is one thing. Watching him do it after he chugs a beer is whole different level of amazing.
- Rainbow Drive-In
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| Eggs over a giant mound of fried rice for breakfast at Rainbow. Huge portions at great prices. |
808.737.0177
I certainly didn’t discover this place – it has been around for over 40 years – but it is top notch. Located just far enough off the beach (about a mile) to keep the casual observers away, the grub is top notch. Breakfast is served until 10:30am and lunch/dinner after that. Huge plate lunch helpings for around $7 each. Hard to go wrong at that point.
View Local Waikiki Dining in a larger map
Posted by Seth on August 27, 2009 under Dining, Trip Reports |
There is really only one restaurant in Ålesund, Norway that gets much of any sense of reviews on the Internet, at least in English. Sjøbua is a seafood shop located at the end of a small street, and it is THE seafood restaurant in Ålesund. The windows of the dining room open up onto the harbor with some pretty phenomenal views and the food is absolutely top notch. The fact that we actually managed to have a meal there was actually quite a surprise. And it was completely worth it – maybe even worth going out of your way to find.
We tried to dine there on our first night in Ålesund but we were led astray by the review from Frommer’s that suggests they are open on Saturday nights. They are not. And we spent the next five nights camping out in the fjords. It turns out that there was cell phone coverage out there but I didn’t bring mine and I certainly had no desire to interrupt the kayaking with trying to get dinner reservations. So we gambled and simply asked at the front desk of the hotel when we returned to civilization on Friday evening. “I’m very sorry sir, they do not have any tables available. Perhaps you would enjoy dining at the Indian restaurant just up on the corner.” That is the same Indian place that we had dined at the previous Saturday when we found Sjøbua to be closed so that wasn’t going to happen.
We gambled, and we won. We walked in to the restaurant shortly after 7pm and announced ourselves as a walk-in couple and pretty much begged for a table. There was a nice bar area that I would have attempted to dine in had things not worked out but that proved unnecessary in the end. It turns out that there was a 6:30pm reservation for two that never showed. And it was now ours!
The food was delicious. Simply off the charts phenomenal. I can attribute some of that to the fact that we’d been dining off of camping stoves the previous five nights, but those meals were actually pretty good (we have made one of them a regular staple at home now) so it can’t have just been that. The food was actually really that good.
We shared an appetizer and had an entree each. We shied away from the (crazy expensive even for Scandinavia) lobster appetizer and had something a bit more pedestrian, though quite delicious and quite local. It was mussels in a relatively traditional preparation and they were delicious, though not necessarily unique.
The coup de grace of the evening, however, came when the entrees were served. Getting the right amount of sauce to cover an entree is always a challenge. It always seems that you get not enough or the meat is swimming in sauce. Neither is a good way to dine. Sjøbua had quite the appropriate solution to that problem. Our meals were served and then, about 30 seconds later, the waiter showed back up at the table with a small bowl containing extra of the sauce. For one of us that meant more actual sauce, and for the other, a small bowl brimming with perfectly prepared thick cut bacon diced into quarter inch cubes, crispy and delicious.
Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t just the bacon that made the dish. The Salt Cod Gratinee (it sounds better in the native Norwegian) was phenomenal all on its own. But the addition of a side of bacon to top it off served as the proverbial icing on the cake. Except it was bacon on fish smothered in a creamy sauce. And extra bacon at that. Truly top notch at every turn.
Posted by Seth on August 4, 2009 under Dining, Trip Reports |
I tend to go a bit overboard when planning for trips to new destinations. I’m prone to obsession over the nuance and detail of the hotels and the restaurants, hoping to find the best (that I can reasonably afford) and ensure that I get to experience them. When the average trip duration is only about 2 days it is rather important to know where the good stuff is before arrival. Otherwise there is way too much potential to miss the essence of a city.
On our most recent Scandinavian adventure I put a fair amount of planning into the Copenhagen aspect of the journey. That was where we were spending the most time and where there seemed to be the best options available to choose from. That meant our arrival into Ålesund was completely unplanned. From the minor details of how to get from the airport to our hotel to where we should eat, I had nothing. There weren’t even taxis at the airport (my fallback plan) to take us into town had we needed one. It was rather unsettling actually. The good news is that we managed to not suffer for it.
Transfer from the airport turned out to be easy – there is a bus that handles that. Sure, it is on the edge of reasonably priced (NOK100/person, ~$15) but that’s WAY cheaper than the taxi option and it did take us right to where we were going which was a nice bonus. We even figured out the bus back into town for dinner the first night. That was only ~$5/person and it gave me a much needed 15 minutes of research time on my Blackberry, time I used to search desperately for a restaurant in town. All the search results pointed in one direction. Sadly those same results misrepresented the operating hours of Sjøbua, falsely indicating that it was open on the Saturday night that we arrived. Strike one for the internet, but we did manage to make up for that a week later.
So instead of seafood we wandered into an Indian place, Agra that proved to be quite passable. Yes, it was expensive ($6 for an order of naan?!?), but not really all that out of line with what any other restaurant in Scandinavia seemed to be running us for dinner. And since it was our last meal before heading out into the kayaks for our fjord paddling we decided to make sure it was a good one. We also passed by the same restaurant on our return a week later. Apparently while we were gone they changed their name to Zangra and divorced themselves from the chain of restaurants on the west coast of Norway under the same name. That was somewhat confusing but the food still looked just fine, even after the change.
The small downtown area was rather pleasant to wander through, with some cute shops and hotels scattered about along the waterfront. We meandered for a bit and took a look at several of the hotels scattered about the harbor area. We ended up booking in at one of them – Hotel Brosundet – for the following week and then got ridiculously lucky. We spotted the guide from our tour, the same guide who was staying in the same campground as us 15 minutes out of town – driving along the road. A loud shout form me, an illegal u-turn from him and a sprint through traffic found us happily ensconced in the company van, headed back to bed down at the campground rather than trying to figure out the return bus schedule.
Thus ended our first experience in Ålesund. Not bad at all and an excellent precursor of the great experiences to come a week later.
Posted by Seth on July 13, 2009 under Dining, Trip Reports |
I have no problems with paying a sizable sum of cash for a truly delicious meal. At the same time, however, I’m not particularly into paying $400-500/person for dinner, nor am I a fan of paying $100/person for blah food. Unfortunately, much of the dining in Copenhagen fits into one of these two categories – outrageously expensive or mediocre (at best) food. That proved challenging to deal with during our three nights in town, but we managed to get by while experiencing a broad spectrum of the options available and not going broke in the process.
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| A kid enjoying an ice cream cone one afternoon in Copenhagen |
First off, the bad. Our hotel was on the Nyhavn, a truly tourist district just across from the opera house. The quarter-mile long strip used to house Copenhagen’s red light district, with brothels and tattoo parlors along the sides of the canal. The storefronts have now converted to a couple dozen restaurants, bars and ice cream shops along the uneven, paving stone drag. And I suppose a few of them might have offered up good food or a reasonable value but we didn’t manage to find that. We did find a $5 scoop of ice cream that was OK and plenty of $12 beers. And we found a place that had a reasonable seafood salad and hamburger, but there is no way that the meal was worth the $85 that it cost. The food wasn’t particularly bad but the value certainly was. So dining on the Nyhavn was pretty much off the list for us, though hundreds of others didn’t seem to mind the mediocrity that it offered based on the crowds we saw. Indeed, I think that having it revert to its previous use might actually be a better use of the space, though that is a different story. And it seemed that dining around Tivoli Gardens was simply asking for more of the same so we were forced to search farther afield for a reasonable meal.
That search led to the Internet (of course) and then to an interesting concept restaurant called Madklubben (translated version here). The restaurant is a couple years old and takes after the typical Danish style of a menu offering a prix fixe menu rather than a la carte dining. But unlike most of the other good restaurants in town the price points on the Madklubben menu were very much in the $50-75/person range rather than the $300/person range. Toss in a bottle of wine from the rather broad wine list and the meal came out to about $200 for the two of us but I was much happier paying that price for the food we got than the Nyhavn meal the previous night. The menu seems to change roughly monthly so there is always something different to try should you go back again.
Our meal at Madklubben was a three course affair meaning that we tasted six different items between the two of us. The smoked herring appetizer was delicious and typically Danish. The broiled bone marrow was plentiful and served with a nice pesto sauce spread that was quite tasty. For main courses we had a pork belly and a brine-cooked beef. Both were quite delicious, with the beef approaching corned beef in flavor and the pork juicy and savory. And then we had the cheese plate and the ice cream with summer berries. It is hard for me to say definitively that any one of the items served was particularly a huge stand out winner and the meal wasn’t the best of my life by any stretch, but the food was all very well prepared and at the end of the night I didn’t feel any disdain or annoyance when the bill came. Oh, and the restaurant had a full-size plastic moose with a lamp sticking out of the head in the entryway which was quite entertaining.
And then there is the best alternative we could come up with for dining – DIY! We were fortunate that our hotel was very close to the Magasin du Nord, the largest department store in Copenhagen. And inside the store, on the bottom floor, there is a grocery, a deli, a coffee shop and a bakery. The bakery and coffee shop served as a great alternative to the $30/person breakfast in the hotel and we managed to put together a quite respectable dinner on our last night in Copenhagen with a quick tour through the aisles of the grocery. A block of cheese, a baguette, some sliced meats, some smoked herring, some grapes and a bottle of wine were more than enough to sate us and it was incredibly affordable. We borrowed some flatware from the hotel restaurant, took our food out to the waterfront at the end of the canal and had a fantastic picnic while watching the traffic pass by on the water and the people pass by on land. All in all, a great alternative to the high priced options of dining in Copenhagen.
And, if you dare, there are always the hotdogs.
After a rather unfortunate episode at the bar of the otherwise lovely Sofitel in the heart of the city a group of us made our way to a new bar/club in town, Eight Seasons. The night manager of the hotel was kind enough to make a call and get six of us on the list to enter which was a good thing as the place had the velvet rope and clipboard crew similar to many clubs in New York City. The scene inside was pretty much what I expected from a club with such an entrance policy but we still had a great time. I’m not entirely sure what we paid for the bottle of Bombay Sapphire that was consumed but it was delicious so I wasn’t all that worried about it. And we finished the night with a very late-night and very intoxicated amble/stumble to a street food vendor outside the train station and also to Burger King. Not the most authentic cuisine, but the strawberry shake was pretty good and the photos are pretty incriminating.
